The Walking Plague
by Reaperofthenight
Summary: The city of Chicago suddenly finds itself under siege from the undead. A handful of survivors try to escape, but find that the the zombies are not the only ones to fear in a city ruled by the undead. Story hopefully better than summary.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter One

Chicago, Illinois.

It was an ordinary day in Chicago, on the evening of the 21st of September. Summer had disappeared like a bad mirage, and now the trees were bursting with red and orange, and soon the leaves would fall away and the eternal cycle would begin all over again. The wind was gradually picking up, and in a few weeks time it would whip off the lake and the cold would settle in on the city like arthritis on bones.

Just outside the city, a single Chicago Police car was moving east on the Reagan Memorial Tollway. Inside the car were Officer Thomas Everett and his partner and long-time friend, Officer Joseph Harris. Tom was sat back in his seat, his hands on the wheel, his eyes scanning the Tollway intently as the breeze coming through the open window ruffled his hair. Sat next to him, Joe Harris was cleaning a shotgun with a cloth.

"_Unit 242, dispatch_." The radio crackled.

"Dispatch, this is Unit 242, go ahead." Tom replied.

"_Unit 142, we've got a 552 on the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway, just outside the city. Render assistance at the scene and determine the extent of the damage. Fire and ambulance crews are en route, over._"

"Uh, copy that dispatch, we're rolling now. Out."

Tom put the mic back in its cradle and looked at Joe.

"What do you think that's all about?" He asked.

"I don't know," Joe replied, stowing the shotgun under the dashboard. "Maybe some guy got drunk and drove off the road. Whatever it is, it's going to fuck up the traffic."

Tom nodded, relieved Joe had put the shotgun away and wasn't going to accidentally blow both their heads off with it.

The car shot down the Tollway, its siren howling like a wounded animal. The car screamed around the corner and Tom slammed on the brakes so hard that both men flew forward in their seats, their belts locking violently around their shoulders. The tires screamed in anger and burned out a ten-foot stretch of skid marks on the asphalt.

"Holy crap." Tom said breathlessly. His knuckles had gone white on the steering wheel.

A truck had jacknifed, tipping on its side and blocking all three lanes of the Tollway. It had spilled its contents during the crash, and now smashed crates and broken pieces of glass littered the highway. About a dozen cars were parked in the breakdown lane, their owners now milling like sheep around the wreckage of the truck. Some of them were using their cell phones, either to talk on or to record the scene on for some juicy YouTube footage.

Tom pulled up behind a parked car, and both officers stepped out of their vehicle and started to jog toward the crash site.

"Anybody see what happened here?" Tom asked the assembled crowd, as Joe went off to look in the trucks cab.

Most of them shook their heads, but an elderly man who had his arm around a woman Tom presumed was his wife, spoke up.

"We were drivin' just in front of it, son." The elderly man said. "I saw 'em fighting in the cab; there was blood everywhere." He paused, evidently pleased with the impression his words had made on the awed crowd, who were looking at him like he was some elderly visionary.

"Fighting?" Tom asked, puzzled.

"Ayuh, it sure looked like it anyway. There was so much blood I couldn't even see inside, and then it just tipped over."

"Do you know if-" Tom began, and then a woman screamed and pointed at the truck.

Tom whirled around with his hand on the butt of his gun, and saw Joe desperately grappling with a heavy, bald headed man wearing a grimy mechanics uniform. He ran for the pair and seized Joe's attacker around the waist, hauling him off his partner. Tom had a second to notice the guttural growling sounds the man was making before he twisted round in his grip, now snapping his jaws at Tom's face instead. Trying to keep a grip on him was like holding a bag of snakes, and the man was no lightweight. Taking a step back to try and keep himself balanced, his foot landed in some slimy substance that was pooling on the ground. He lost his balance and fell down with the man still on top of him. There was blood around the mans mouth and chin, and Tom suddenly realised that if he could not get this psycho off him soon, his throat would get torn open like a chicken drumstick.

Fortunately, that was when Joe's shoe connected solidly with the side of the crazy man's head. He went of rolling off, still snarling and growling, and Tom took the opportunity to jump to his feet and draw his gun. Next to him, Joe had done the same thing. Tom moved forward, meaning to try and cuff the guy before he could get back up but the man was already struggling back to his feet, looking around with his head low and his face curled into a predatory sneer.

"_Put your fucking hands up!_" Tom yelled. "_Last warning!_"

The man made a noise that was a cross between a scream and a snarl, and lunged at them again. Tom gripped his right wrist with his left hand, and squeezed the Glock's trigger. There was a dull flash of fire as the gun spat out its bullet, and Tom saw a smoking hole appear in the mans leg. Joe then fired off three shots in quick succession and more smoking holes appeared in the attacker's chest. Then the man slammed into Tom and both of them fell to the ground again.

His gun went flying and clattered to the ground. Tom grabbed the man's head in one hand, trying to keep his mouth away from his throat, whilst his other hand groped madly for the gun lying next to them. One of the crazy man's hands found its way to Tom's throat and began to squeeze, and Tom saw the look in his pale and somehow dusty eyes. There was no anger or hate in his eyes, just a kind of vacant emptiness.

Tom's hand wrapped around the gun just as his lungs began to feel like they would implode from lack of air. He grabbed it and put it against the mans forehead as the world slowly began to fade and lose its colour.

Two shots banged out, and Tom felt the vibration slam up his arm. The man on top of him ceased snarling immediately and fell sideways off of him, revealing a very pale Joe stood with his gun still clasped in both hands.

"Jesus fuck, dude." Joe said, helping Tom to his feet. "Are you okay? I couldn't have shot him it would have hit you too. Jesus Christ…"

"I'm okay, man." Tom said, coughing as the air rushed back into his lungs. He put his gun back in its holster with hands that shook slightly. The front of his blue uniform was stained with blood.

"What was wrong with him, Tom?" Joe asked, seeming scared. "Was he on drugs or something? I've never seen anything like that in my life…"

"I've never heard of a drug that lets you get shot and not even feeling anything." Tom said.

"What about steroids?" Joe asked, apparently determined to find a rational explanation to what had just occurred.

"Joe for fuck's sake, we shot him four times and it didn't even slow him down." Tom surveyed the scene; one crashed truck, one dead crazy man. "_Bleeding Christ._"

"C'mon, we need to check out the truck," He said, suddenly remembering what the old man had said to him.

Joe nodded and the two of them jogged over to where the truck lay on its side like a dead dinosaur. One look inside the blood-splattered cab was enough to confirm Tom's suspicions. He felt his blood suddenly turn to ice in his veins. It was easy enough to see what had happened here; Man is driving truck, man picks up hitchhiker, hitchhiker goes crazy and kills man causing truck to crash. Hitchhiker attacks two cops and takes six bullets before being shot in the head, which puts him down for good.

_Elementary, Watson,_ Tom thought. _Ele-fucking-mentary._

He suddenly realised he felt a little like puking and turned away before he blew his groceries all over the place. An ambulance followed by two State Police cars was arriving on the scene, and Tom went to talk to them whilst Joe moved to keep the crowd back. A tall black Trooper wearing a Stetson stepped out of the car, his eyes surveying the scene grimly.

"What in the name of Christ happened here, son?" He asked as two paramedics went to examine the man who had attacked Tom.

"What happened is some crazy son of a bitch killed the guy driving that truck then tried to kill me and my partner, so I shot him. We've got one suspect down and another dead man inside that truck."

"Jesus," One of the paramedics looking over the dead man said. "Did you really need to shoot him five times?"

"He didn't go down until I shot him in the head." Tom explained. "It was like he couldn't even feel the other bullets."

"That's impossible." The tall Trooper said simply.

"You're fucking telling me." Tom retorted, and then jerked his thumb toward the assembled crowd, who were now being kept away from the scene by strings of yellow tape. "But it happened, and any of those people over there will tell you." He lowered his voice a little. "And before he died he was going for my throat; with his _teeth._"

"Like Dawn of the Dead, eh?" Said one paramedic, a young man with carroty hair. "You gotta shoot them in the head."

"Not helping, dude." Joe said, walking over. His eyes looked sick and his face was extremely pale. He looked at Tom and the Trooper. "If we hadn't shot him he would have killed us."

The Trooper was speechless. The three men looked at the scene without talking, just taking it in. The crashed truck, the dead man lying in the middle of the road, the first arriving emergency responders and the crowd excitedly muttering to each other. Tom didn't know why, but it felt like an omen of things to come.

Four hours later and night had fallen over Chicago in earnest. The city slept uneasily under the wings of night and in the in the black depths of space the first stars had begun to shine like hard chips of ice. Tom Everett was sat in the Chicago PD headquarters, jangling his car keys in one hand and relaying the events of the day over and over in his head.

The man's name had been John Anderson.

The man in the truck had been his brother, Robert Anderson.

Beyond that, they didn't know a fucking thing. They didn't know what had driven John Anderson to attack and kill his brother, they didn't know what had driven him to attack two cops, and they _certainly _did not know what had allowed him to take half a dozen bullets without showing an ounce of discomfort. Worst still, the forensic team had apparently discovered evidence that John Anderson hadn't just killed his brother. The wounds on Robert Anderson had been inflicted by his brother's teeth.

Tom thought this might have been one of the most horrible incidents in his career.

He kept thinking back to the look in John Andersons eyes; that cataclysmic…emptiness. But Tom had thought there might have been something else under it and now he knew it for what it was. It had been hunger. Tom shivered and looked at his cell phone which was lying on the desk. He had needed someone to talk to and he had considered phoning his wife, but she was visiting some relatives in Maine, and the last thing he wanted was for her to worry.

_At least it's over now_, he thought to himself. The thought brought little comfort.

He sighed and put the phone in his jeans pocket, then stood up and left the room.

It had just gone midnight.

Down in the morgue of County General Hospital, two men in surgical scrubs and face masks stood over the body of the unfortunate Robert Anderson, who was laid out on the table in front of them. The body of John Anderson had already been flown out of the city to a secure location.

"So, I'd say it was throat laceration that killed him." One of the men was saying, wiping the blood off his white gloves. "You agree Blake?"

"Yeah," Said Blake. "What time's he due to be flown out?"

His colleague gave a cursory glance at a nearby clipboard. "He needs to be at O'Hare Airport by 0040 hours. A C-130's scheduled to take fly him out to Andrews AFB at 0100 hours."

"We'd best hurry this up then." Blake said, glancing down at the corpse on the table. He jumped with surprise.

Robert Anderson's eyes had opened. His jaw fell open in a slack snarl as he slowly began to register the two men stood above him. He began to sit up.

"Good morning, Mr Anderson." Blake said pleasantly, drawing the silenced 9mm he had been holding under the table and shooting Anderson twice in the head. He fell back on the table with a muffled thump, mercifully dead at last.

"That was a close one." Blake's colleague remarked, his eyes grim over the rim of his surgical mask. "I'd he'd been just one second faster-"

"Yeah, well he wasn't." Blake said, putting the gun away. "C'mon, let's get a gurney and wheel this dead bastard out to the van. We're handing him over to the guys at the airport and then we're getting extracted from Chicago in the morning."

"Alright," The other man said, nodding and they turned to leave the room.

"I hope my next assignment's in Florida, or California." Blake grumbled on the way out. "Hell, even Tehran would be fine. Just as long as I'm nowhere near Chicago."

His colleague nodded. He had been in this field of work long enough to know that Chicago had now quite possibly become the most dangerous place on earth.

A.N. This is the end of chapter one, please read and review, constructive criticism welcome :)


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

At 6:45am the next day, Thomas Everett was woken up by the sound of the alarm clock breaking the morning silence. He opened his eyes groggily then winced as the alarm beeped again, sending needles of pain deep into his head. His arm swept out from under the bed covers and knocked it to the ground. It landed on the carpet with a soft thump, beeped valiantly once more and then fell silent. Tom turned over in bed, expecting to see the familiar shape of his wife beneath the covers. There was a momentary flicker of surprise when he saw she was not there, and then he remembered.

Maine. Vicky was in Maine, visiting her parents. Tom would have come with her but the bastards in the police department wouldn't let him have the time off work. He rolled over onto his back and yawned, his head filling up with memories of the previous day.

_Oh yeah,_ he remembered dismally, the cocktail of guilt sinking in. _I killed a guy._

He sat back up and swung his feet onto the floor. He stayed that way for a minute longer, then stood up and went to get in the shower.

About an hour later he was fully dressed and getting ready to leave when someone outside rang the doorbell. Puzzled, he went and opened it, letting in a flood of mellow morning sunshine.

"Thomas Everett?" enquired the man who was stood on his front porch. He was wearing a white coverall like the kind worn by forensic teams and red-striped sneakers on his feet.

"Uh, yes." Tom said, still puzzled. "How can I help you?"

"My name is Lance White, Mr Everett." He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes, which remained shrewd and calculating. "I'm from the U.S. Public Health Service."

_Sure,_ Tom thought for no reason at all._ Sure you are._

"May I come in?" Mr White enquired politely, still smiling.

"Sure." Tom said, opening the door wider to let him in. As White stepped in, Tom saw there was a grey van parked across the street. He looked at it for a second longer, and closed the door.

Lance White was walking around the front room, looking with interest at the photographs on top of the fireplace.

"Is your wife in?" He enquired, pointing to one of the photos.

"I'm afraid not; she's visiting her parents in Maine." Tom explained, standing in the doorway. "She'll be gone until next week."_ But you already knew that didn't you?_ That was an unusually paranoid thought. Maybe the incident yesterday had affected him more than he thought.

"I see." Lance said, and looked back at the photos. "Any children?"

"No." Tom replied, wondering exactly where this was going.

Lance was nodding. "Mr Everett, we believe that Jonathan Anderson, the man who attacked you and your partner Joseph Harris yesterday may have been carrying a strain of rabies."

Tom said nothing. He felt rooted to the spot.

"Whilst we are aware that neither you nor your partner was bitten by this man, we feel it would be prudent to carry out some routine tests on you, just to make sure you haven't contracted this disease." White gave what he no doubt thought was a reassuring smile, but it turned out like something you would expect to see on a psychotic clown.

"I see," Tom said. He sounded calm enough, but a small sector of his mind, hidden away at the back of his brain was raving, _Rabies! Rabies! Rabies!_

"It'll only take a few minutes and once we're finished we'll be out of your way." White concluded.

"Right. Sure." Tom considered for a moment and then asked the question he didn't really want to know the answer to. "What happens if I test positive?"

"You'll be given the best treatment possible." White replied, not including that the only viable treatment in this case would be a bullet to the head.

Five minutes later, Tom was sat at his kitchen table, the sleeve of his shirt rolled up. A man in a white coverall was putting a needle against the inside of his arm. Tom looked away, feeling ill. He had been at his fair share of bloody crime scenes, but he still had no urge to watch the needle sink into his arm. He felt the needle come out of his wrist and looked back. It was now full of his-quite possibly infected-blood.

_Please God no._ But he doubted that God would comply just because he asked nicely.

The man with the needle carefully passed it over to another man, who injected it into a small plastic tube. The man then added several drops of some sort of clear liquid, before lightly shaking the plastic tube. Tom glanced over at Lance White, who looked oddly like a cartoon character sat on the washing machine in his white coverall.

The man with the plastic tube extracted some of Tom's blood and added several drops of it onto a small glass slide, before slotting it under a microscope. Tom sat still, barely even breathing. After what seemed like a year of eternities, the man looked back up.

"Clear." He said.

Tom's chest let go and he breathed a deep sigh of relief.

"Excellent," White said, practically leaping off the washing machine and enthusiastically shaking Tom's hand. "Isn't that great news?" He said, beaming.

"Yeah, yeah that's great news," Tom agreed, grinning in spite of himself, still feeling almost euphoric with relief. "So, what now?"

"We're done here." White said, gesturing around the kitchen. The two men were silently and efficiently packing their equipment back up.

"Okay, well…thanks very much."

"Just doing my job, Mr Everett." White said, grinning.

Tom walked him to the front door. "If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to contact us." White said, as the two men shook hands.

"Okay," Tom said. "Thanks again, man."

White tipped him a salute and Tom closed the door, amazed at how quickly that had all happened.

Outside, White walked out onto the sidewalk and looked around the street, no longer grinning. He looked like he was thinking carefully. All was quiet, but as far as Lance White was concerned, it was the calm before the storm. The silence was rippled by a faint whine coming out of the west that soon turned into a full-throated roar. White looked up into the sky and saw a jet fighter scream over the street at treetop level, loud enough to rattle the windows of the nearby houses. White watched it go before heading back to the van. He was grinning again.

* * *

"And Sandra talked to one of the doctors at the hospital," Joe was saying as they were on patrol an hour later. "He said they couldn't have been testing for rabies that way."

"So what _were_ they testing for?" Tom asked, keeping his eyes on the road as he drove.

"I don't know," Joe admitted. "But whatever it was we didn't have it, so we don't have to worry about it, right?"

"Right." Tom replied._ Wrong._

There was a convenience store with a gas station in front on the intersection of 87th and Cottage Grove. Tom was about to suggest pulling in to fill up the tank (and maybe get a doughnut) when he saw that some kind of disturbance appeared to be taking place. Several people were stood around it, and Tom saw with unease that another squad car was parked in front of it. Seconds later a gunshot rang out and the small crowd bolted, fleeing back across the parking lot.

Tom and Joe exchanged a glance, and Tom turned on the siren and swung the car neatly into the stores parking lot. The crowd, which had reassembled at the very edge of the sidewalk, their curiosity apparently outweighing their fear, moved aside uneasily to let them through. Tom parked the squad car behind the first, and both men got out.

"You'd better get backup on the radio, man." Tom said, taking his gun out of its holster and flicking off the safety. "And get those people out of here."

Tom moved up to the front door of the store, his gun pointing towards the ground. He crouched by the entrance and poked his head round the corner. It was relatively big convenience store, with four aisles that ran up towards the cash register. In the one aisle that Tom could see lay a dead man in a police uniform. There were streaks of blood on the floor that looked horribly bright and jaunty in the fluorescent lighting. A crash came from the back of the store as something was knocked over and an angry yell echoed up the aisles. Tom felt goose bumps rise on his arms. There was something familiar in that sound.

"Jesus, son of a bitch is a cop killer." That was Joe, who had joined him on the opposite side of the door, his gun also out. "Backup's on the way. You want to wait for it?"

Tom shook his head and looked back inside the door. He could hear something moving back there, maybe more than one thing. He could remember going to see Jurassic Park as a teenager and thinking the whole film was pretty dumb. The only thing that had scared him had been the dinosaurs that had one huge claw on each foot. The Velociraptors. Those fuckers were _fast._ Now it was them he imagined, prowling the aisles at the back of the store, nosing their long snouts among the spills tins of food, their claws clacking dully against the floor.

He ran through the options in his mind. Whoever they were, they had already killed one cop. Somehow, Tom didn't think shouting "_Freeze! Police!" _would do any good in this situation. If they came out now, they would kill him and Joe and then escape. If Tom and Joe caught them off guard however, they might be able to disarm the robbers, or at least kill them before they hurt anyone else.

He held up one finger to Joe. _Wait, _the gesture said. Joe looked at him quizzically, but stayed where he was. Tom jogged back to the squad car, listening out for the sound of approaching sirens. There were none so far. It looked like they were going solo on this then.

Tom opened the car door and reached under the dash, retrieving the Remington pump-action shotgun that was clipped there. Tom checked to make sure it was loaded and ran back to the store, stowing his pistol back in its holster as he went. Joe's eyes widened slightly at the sight of the shotgun. Tom shrugged and cocked his head towards the door. Joe nodded and the two officers crept inside. The fluorescent lights made the situation more surreal, shining sanely down on the damage. The knocked over shelves, the spilled drinks, the coke fridge with a single bloody handprint smeared across it. Something bad had gone down here, and Tom was starting to suspect it was more than just a robbery.

Joe pointed at himself and then down the far aisle. Tom nodded; he would take the aisle at the far end of the store and they would flank whoever was crashing around at the back of the store. Tom crept around the far aisle, ready to discharge the Remington at a moments notice. There were two more bodies back here, a man and a woman. It was really a hell of a lot of trouble to go through just to rob a large convenience store wasn't it? His fingers were leaving marks of perspiration along the barrel of the shotgun. If anyone came round the corner of the aisle now, Tom would blow their head right off. He reached the end of the aisle, the shifting sounds closer now. Whoever was making them was right around the corner. He hoped to God that Joe was in position at the other end of the store.

He tightened his grip on the shotgun, whispered a quick prayer to whoever might be listening, and shouted "Now!"

He stepped out from behind the aisle and what he saw appalled him, sickening him to his stomach and making one irrefutable statement stand out in his mind, flashing out like a neon sign:

This was not a robbery.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3-The Fifth Horseman

September 19th

When the man walked towards the front desk of Mercy General Hospital, Dr. Douglas Gaines ticked off his symptoms almost subconsciously; flushed face, runny nose, visible perspiration on the neck and face. He was wearing a scarf in spite of the fact that today, on the morning of the 18th September, it was relatively warm outside. This indicated he might have been suffering chills and fever. All these were symptoms of Influenza. Doug hoped flu season wouldn't be starting early this year, especially with swine flu still lurking around out there.

"Um, hello." The man said awkwardly as he reached the desk. He coughed several times into his hand and then said; "Uh, I'm not feeling so good. To be honest I feel like crap."

Doug smiled reassuringly. It was automatic, like flicking on a light bulb. "What seems to be the problem?" He asked pleasantly.

"I ache like hell, my nose feels clogged and throat's sore." He turned his head and coughed again, giving Doug a good view of his neck. Doug saw with some concern that a faint red smudge was present on his throat. "Ordinarily I would have stayed at home in bed, but I just feel so crappy and-" The man sucked in breath and Doug heard his throat rattling with mucus "-sometimes it's difficult to breath." He finished.

"Okay sir, don't worry." Doug said. This was automatic as well. It was something you picked up as a doctor, much better than saying _hmm _or _that's strange _or _I think you're going to die._ He attached a fresh chart to his clipboard. "My name's Doug, I'm going to take good care of you, I just need a few details first; if you'd like to take a seat."

The man nodded and sat down heavily in a nearby chair. He coughed again.

"Can I ask your name and age?"

"Derek Johnston, 41."

"Your address?"

"227 Melford Avenue, Scottsdale."

"When did you first begin exhibit these symptoms?"

"Two days ago."

"Have you been abroad recently or been in any contact with any person who was suffering from a disease?"

"No, nothing like that."

"Alright then." Doug put the clipboard down and folded his arms. "It sounds to me like you're suffering from either influenza or some kind of other respiratory infection. Can I ask what those red marks on your neck are?"

Johnston seemed confused, which was the last reaction Doug had expected.

"What red marks?" He asked, his fingers automatically going to his throat. Doug searched the pockets of his white coat and after a moment brought out a small square mirror. He handed it to Johnston who looked at his reflection, cocking his head to get a full view of his neck. He blinked several times in surprise.

"They weren't there when I left the house." He said uneasily. "What do you think they are?"

"Do you have any allergies, Mr. Johnston?"

"None that I'm aware of." Johnston replied.

Doug was concerned, but was able to hide the concern from his face. As a doctor, that skill came in handy. "If you'd like to come with me I can get you to a room." He said.

Johnston let loose another bellowing sneeze, and nodded, his hands still gingerly touching his neck, where those peculiar red marks had formed.

Later that day, at around one o' clock, Doug approached the nurse's station. Michelle, the nurse sat behind the desk, offered him her usual sunny smile.

"How can I help you Doug?" She asked.

"Have Mr. Johnston's lab results come back yet?" He asked her.

Michelle typed at the keys on her computer and briefly scanned the screen.

"Nope, sorry." She said. "How is he?"

"Not good." Doug replied gravely, consulting his chart. "His fever's reached one-hundred degrees, swelling of the lymph nodes is present. He's reported trouble breathing and those weird marks on his neck have become slightly more noticeable."

"Hmm," Michelle said, her countenance clouding over. Suddenly it brightened again. "Well at least he's got one of the best doctors in Chicago looking after him."

Doug smiled. "Thanks Michelle. Maybe I'll go pay the lab a visit; see what kind of progress they're making." Unfortunately that was when his pager started beeping. Doug looked at it, swore under his breath, and before Michelle could ask what was wrong, he was running to Derek Johnston's room, his white coat flapping out behind him.

When he arrived one of the interns, Derek Johnston's machines were beeping and flashing urgently. Johnston himself lay there in a kind of sludgy semi-consciousness; the flesh around his neck was swollen and red. A small trickle of blood escaped his left nostril.

"He's gone into respiratory failure." The intern who had paged Doug said. "One second he was fine, the next-bam."

"Okay, get a tracheal intubation set up, now."

The intern hurried off and Doug ran over to Johnston. Even over the clamor of the machines, Doug could hear the poor man's desperate gasps for breath. It sounded like the wind whistling through the eaves of a haunted house, and in spite of his concern for his patient, Doug felt a sudden strange urge to just run away.

"Derek, can you hear me?" Doug asked, getting a grip on it. "Mr. Johnston?"

Johnston muttered an indistinct reply that was clogged with phlegm. The intern came back with the intubation equipment, but before he could even administer the anesthetic, Derek Johnston's eyes snapped fully open. He took in a deep, strangling breath that made his whole body arch off the bed. He hitched in another one, and then his chest settled like a flat tire. The heart monitor stopped beeping and let out one high pitched whine.

Doug used the chest paddles five times without success. The heart monitor continued to emit the same high-pitched whine. Johnston was dead. Doug dropped the paddles dispiritedly onto the tray and peeled off his transparent gloves.

"Time of death, 11:12am." Doug said, looking up at the scared intern. "You okay, kid?"

"It was just…so fast." The intern gulped, his eyes wide. "Never seen anything like it."

"Me neither," Doug said, looking down at the man who had come in complaining of flu-like symptoms and had died four hours later. The intern left, drifting out of the room like a sleepwalker, and Doug gently pulled the sheet up and covered Johnston's face with it. The rate that Johnston had deteriorated was staggering. In his five years of working in medicine, Doug had never seen anything like it.

Doug was about to walk out the room when Derek Johnston sat up, the sheet still covering his face. It was a classic horror movie moment; the unsuspecting victim walks into the mortuary where the body lies on the table. Said unsuspecting victim slowly approaches the table, and as the tension builds to a climax the body sits up and the unsuspecting victim screams as the camera cuts away from their sudden and violent death. Doug had always laughed at such scenes; he thought that they were corny as hell. Nevertheless, when Derek Johnston's body sat up on that bed with the sheet still covering his face, Doug felt such an explosion of terror that his every nerve ending seemed to shriek with horror. His limbs felt like they had turned to vapor.

The sheet fell off Derek Johnston's head, exposing a vacant, pallid face in which his eyes glittered like dull diamonds. The swellings in his neck had gone down, although it remained red and blotchy. Doug tried to speak and all that came out was a guttural vocalization of surprise: _Gluh?_

Johnston leaped off the bed and landed on Doug, knocking the wind out of him. The two of them crashed against the wall with a muffled thump. Several surprised screams rang out from the corridor. Doug raised his arm to try and shield his face and Johnston's jaws instantly clamped down on the flesh there. The pain was indescribable. Doug shoved Johnston with his arms as hard as he could, yelling in fear, pain and anger. Johnston fell back onto the bed and Doug turned and sprinted from the room as fast as he could, slamming the door behind him. He turned the lock just as Johnston's body slammed into it, causing the whole wall to shiver. Doug stepped back, panting, his entire body surging with adrenaline. He looked down at the bleeding gash on his arm which was throbbing with pain. Christ, the fucker had _bitten_ him!

Never mind that, his mind said. The fucker had been _dead!_

"Doug?" That was Michelle, the nurse he had spoken to about Johnston's lab results. "What's going on?"

"He was dead…" Doug muttered. The world had gone grey, and everything had receded into indistinct shadows. Michelle's voice echoed down to him from an infinitely long tunnel. He felt a hand slap across his face, leaving a painful stinging sensation. It could be used however. Doug connected with the pain, felt it, used it to drag himself back into the real world.

"Thanks, I needed that." Doug said to Michelle. "Get security now. We've got a psychopath in there."

Michelle threw an uneasy glance at the door then ran off down the hallway, past several doctors and patients curiously poking their heads out of their rooms.

When Michelle came back a minute later, Doug had disinfected the wound and was going about bandaging it. She stepped towards him though the gaggle of onlookers, her face concerned. Two security guards were stood by Derek Johnston's door, which was still thumping and rattling.

"I just spoke to Dr. Carter," She said. "Apparently she got on the phone to some people and they're going to be here any minute."

"People?" Doug asked. "What people?"

"I don't know." She shrugged. "But apparently she was told to contact them if anything like this happened."

Doug opened his mouth to say something, then turned his head and coughed twice. Carter was the Chief of Medicine. Who had she contacted? And just what the fuck was going on here anyway?

"Okay, can you get these people back to their rooms please?" He asked, trying to assume some semblance of control over the situation.

Turning and walking down the corridor, Doug reflected on how quickly a normal day could get screwed up. His whole mind was swimming. The idea that a dead man had come back to life and attacked him was something that would not even fit through the doors of his perception. He stood in front of the plate glass window, looking at the city passing a few stories below and wishing bitterly that someone else had been on call this morning. From here, you could see the whole parking lot spread out below you like a map, the cars parked there the size of Lego bricks from this height. There were cars coming in now, Doug saw. Three black SUV's were turning into the parking lot, chrome winking dully in the sun. Men were climbing out and running for the hospital entrance.

Doug turned and stood at the end of the corridor. There was an elevator at the other end and now the small red numbers at the top began to count upwards from zero. The elevator doors slid open, revealing Dr. Cater, flanked by three other men clad in white coveralls. They had filter masks over the lower half of their faces. Doug started to walk slowly down the corridor in that direction, taking great care to hide his bandaged arm behind his back. It suddenly seemed very important to him that these men did not find out he had been bitten. He stood at the very back of the lingering crowd and watched anxiously.

Doug heard Carter say something to the men and they turned to Derek Johnston's door. The two security guards stepped aside. One of the men grabbed the door handle, and the other two stood behind him.

The third man turned to face them. "Don't come inside." He said.

Then the first man flung the door open and they crashed into the room. Doug could see nothing from where he was stood but he could hear the scuffling sounds coming from inside. Carter was stood back against the wall apprehensively, Michelle and several patients stood nearby. One of Derek Johnston's thin, somehow unnatural screams echoed up the corridor. Once. Twice. A third one, now sounding somewhat muffled. Then, after what seemed like hours, Johnston was hauled out of the room. He had been placed in handcuffs and leg irons, and a strait jacket covered most of his body. Some kind of metal mask had been placed on his head, and he looked like Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter. Two of the men shoved him to the elevator whilst the third one spoke to the watching crowd.

"Has anyone here been bitten, scratched, or been in any other kind of direct contact with this man?" He asked. No one answered but Doug saw Michelle throw a nervous glance at him. He shook his head at her almost imperceptibly.

"If anyone has, it is in your best interests to let us know."

Silence from the watching crowd. The man turned and left.

The crowd began to break up, muttering to each other. Carter saw Doug and came over to him, her face pale and strained. Doug suspected that he did not look much better.

"You okay, Doug? You look like hell." She said, confirming his suspicions.

"Yeah, I'm fine thanks." Doug replied, trying his best at a smile. "Just glad I managed to get out before he got to me." He looked around and lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. "Andrea what's going on here? What was wrong with that man? Who were those people?"

Carter only shook her head. "I don't know, they haven't told me much, and what they have said, I'm not allowed to repeat." She rolled her eyes. "Just try and forget about it, Doug. It's in everyone's best interests." Her voice was steady but her eyes were scared.

Doug nodded solemnly and covered his mouth as a racking cough tore loose from his chest. Carter smiled at him compassionately.

"You should go home Doug." She said. "You look like shit."

Carter sure was not one to mince her words, but Doug _did_ feel like shit. He supposed it was the shock setting in or something.

"Thanks Andrea, I'll do that."

_But first, I think I'll pay a little visit to the lab,_ he thought.

He went down there as soon as Carter left, down three flights of stairs and up the corridor until he reached a door with a sign stamped on the frosted glass reading; _Medical Laboratory._ He went inside.

Dr. Webber, the pathologist, was studying a microscope intently. When Doug entered, he looked up immediately, a tall balding man in his forties.

"Ah, Doctor Gaines," Webber said. "I've just been analyzing your Mr. Johnston's slides."

"Mr. Johnston's no longer with us." Doug told him.

Webber frowned at him. "What do you mean?" He asked.

"Doesn't matter." Doug said, waving it away. _And you wouldn't believe me if I told you._ "Have you found anything?"

"Well, I've been studying them using all the equipment available to me, and I've also asked for input from Dr. Clarke and Dr. Ross."

"And?" Doug asked impatiently. He could feel a sneeze building in the back of his nose.

"I'll be honest with you, Dr. Gaines." Webber said, sighing. "I don't have a fucking clue."

"I'm sorry, what?"

"One second it looks like flu," Webber explained, jamming his eye back to the microscope. "The next, pneumonia. The next, the frigging AIDS virus. I've never seen anything like it before."

"Let me see." Doug said. He walked up to the microscope and put his eye to the lens. Underneath it, magnified a thousand times was a small, fluttering organism. As Doug watched it drifted serenely around the slide, its jellyfish like appendages drifting like ghosts. Doug had seen all sorts of viruses under a microscope; flu, Ebola, SARS, AIDS, Chicken Pox, you name it. What he was seeing under the microscope now had similarities to all those things, but was somehow infinitely different too. Something new. Doug felt a shiver run up his back.

"I've seen enough." He saw, drawing back. He felt repulsed, as if just looking at the thing had dirtied him somehow.

"Thanks, that'll be all." He turned and left the room. Webber nodded and went back to studying the thing currently haunting the slide under his microscope. In half an hour, Webber would return from getting a cup of coffee to find that all medical information on Johnston, including the microscope slides, had apparently vanished into thin air.

Douglas Gaines left work immediately after. He was freaked out; all he wanted to do was go home and forget this entire rotten rancid day had ever happened. Preferably with the assistance of Mr. Jack Daniels. He climbed in his car, sprayed a sudden sneeze onto the dashboard, and drove away.

He arrived at his home in the Lincoln Park neighborhood half an hour later, stepping out of the car and nearly stumbling as a racking fit of coughing seized him. When it tapered off, he went inside. The house was empty for the moment; his wife was at work and their teenage son was at school. Doug took two aspirin, drank a tumbler of whisky, and went to bed. Climbing the stairs, he was surprised at how weak he felt; halfway to the top he actually had to pause and catch his breath. His mind felt foggy and slow, and dropped gratefully onto the soft bed, unaware of the red patches that had slowly begun to form on his neck, or of the billions of microscopic bacteria which now danced and capered in his bloodstream, laying waste to everything they found.

Douglas Gaines climbed out of bed a few minutes later, and prowled his bedroom, occasionally bursting into a series of hoarse snarls and shouts when he heard a voice passing outside his house. When his wife got home four hours later, he killed her and an hour later his son arrived home, late from school because he had been smoking with his friends. When he saw his parents stood at the end of the hallway, silhouetted by the light being thrown from the kitchen, he was certain that they had smelled the tobacco on him. Shit, they would be so angry they'd rip him to shreds.

As things turned out, that was exactly what they did.

It was 6:00pm.

* * *

Shaun Roper was a truck driver for the United Parcel Service, and today, on the morning of the 20th September, he was driving his truck up Andover Street in the neighborhood of Lincoln Park. There was a package on the seat next to him, listed on his chart as being for Mr. Douglas Gaines, 42 Andover Street, Lincoln Park. Whistling to himself, Shaun pulled up outside the Gaines house, hefted the package in his arms, and walked up the driveway to the house. Halfway to the house, the wind freshened and brought with it a strange, somehow sickeningly sweet odor. It lingered for a moment, then the wind freshened again and carried it away.

Shaun reached the front door and rang the doorbell. When no one answered, he rang again. It was Wednesday; it was likely that the occupants were at work and unfortunately it was not company policy to leave the package in a mailbox or with a neighbor, unsigned by the person it was addressed to. Shaun sighed and took out a small slip of paper from his the pocket of his shorts. He wrote that he arrived to find nobody in, added the time and date, as well as contact details and the time that he intended to call back. He pushed the slip through the mail slot in the center of the front door and let it drop. As he was about to withdraw his fingers the whole door shook in its frame and he felt a searing pain in the fingers he had pushed through the door. With a strangled curse, he pulled them out and inspected them. His index finger was okay, but his middle one had been scratched from base to fingernail. Shaun put it in his mouth, furious. Why couldn't people keep their damn dogs away from the mail slot? He was lucky he hadn't had his goddam fingers torn off. Still muttering and cursing under his breath, he walked back to his truck, carrying the package under one arm. That strange odor drifted past his nose again, but he was too preoccupied with the throbbing in his finger to notice it. He climbed back behind the wheel of his truck and drove away. His last delivery of the day came at around 6:00pm, to an old lady in Ashburn. She signed for the package, then looked up at him and said sweetly;

"There you go; you take care of that cold now."

Shaun was honestly taken aback. Cold? It was then he realized that his nose was running like a stream. He had been too busy today to even notice until she had pointed it out. Shaun said he would, and walked back to his truck. First he nearly gets his fingers ripped off, now he's coming down with a cold. Oh well, it was just one of those shit days that everybody had from time to time. The next morning, he woke up to sunlight streaming through the window and the sound of birds twittering outside. He climbed out of bed, stood up, and the world immediately turned into a grey vacuum of disorientation. He pin wheeled his arms to keep his balance but failed miserably and fell back onto the bed. His fiancée Molly had been getting ready for work and now she walked in, concerned.

"Shaun?" She asked. "What's wrong, what's the matter?"

"I feel like crap." He said thickly. "I think I'm gonna take the day off."

"Jesus, Shaun," She said, putting a hand to his forehead. "You're burning up. You want a Dayquil or anything?"

"No, hon." He said. He had climbed back under the covers and was already drifting off to sleep. "You just…go to…work." The last word drifted off into something that was barely intelligible and a moment later, Shaun was snoring quietly. Molly put a hand to his forehead again, wincing at how hot he was. Even being near him was like standing next to a barbecue. She kissed him on the lips, sealing her fate immediately, and left for work. She drifted serenely through the workday at the salon, but it was on her way home, that the day took an irrefutable turn for the worst. Her car, a three year old Chevy, hiccupped twice and almost stalled. Seeing where this was going, Molly managed to coast it onto the curb, where it backfired loudly, stuttered like a machine gun (A sound that would soon become all too common on the streets of Chicago), and finally died (Another thing that would become common). Molly turned the key in the ignition. Nothing.

"Motherfucker!" She declared, striking the wheel with one well-manicured hand. The fact of the car dying was not the main thing that irritated her; what irritated her was that she would now have to call Anderson. And God, she hated that son of a bitch. Nevertheless, she flipped her cell phone out of her pocket in a well-practiced movement that she had done a thousand times. She found Andersons number, and called it. It was answered on the first ring.

"Hey, babe," John Anderson's voice said over the phone. "I knew you wouldn't be able to stay away for long. Finally get bored of the fiancé?"

"Shut up." She said curtly. "My car's broken down; corner of Jackson and Willamette. Can you get here?"

"Anything for you, Mol." Anderson said. "But what'll you do for me in return?"

"I'll try not to rip your balls off." She ended the call, and in good time too, for a ripping sneeze suddenly sprayed out of her. He coughed to clear her throat, and leaned back in the seat, hoping she wasn't coming down with whatever Shaun had. Anderson arrived about ten minutes later, the Ford he drove around in almost in worse condition than Molly's Chevy. He climbed out and Molly found herself wondering why she had slept with him in the first place. He was at least fifteen years older than her and balding, but he was a charming guy and-_let's face it folks_-he had been great in the sack.

"Hey, Molly." He said, smiling as he leaned in the window. "What's the situation?"

"My car broke down," She explained. "Why else do you think I called you?"

"Well I thought maybe you were missing me." He said, still smiling. His breath smelled faintly of faintly of Rolaids, as usual.

"Leave it, John." She said firmly. " You and I are over. I' getting married and that's the end of it. Now please, just take a look at the car."

John scowled, opened the hood and rummaged around inside it. Almost instantly he said;

"Yup, your spark plugs need replacing. Wait here a minute."

Molly, who had been drifting off, nodded. She was starting to get a killer headache and her neck and joints were throbbing dully. It took about five minutes but eventually Anderson slammed the hood of the car down and walked around to the drivers-side window.

"Try it now." He said.

Molly turned the key and the car roared to life immediately. She felt a suddenly rush of relief and gratitude that temporarily washed her headache away like the tide on a beach.

"Thanks John," She said. "How much do I owe you?"

"Don't worry about it," John said, waving it away. "But if you insist on giving me something…a kiss would be good."

Sighing, Molly leaned out of the window and kissed him briefly on the lips. That was another thing; he was a damn good kisser. Knowing she had ventured into dangerous territory and regretting it already, Molly withdrew, bid him goodbye and drove off. Anderson watched her go, smiling. That kiss hadn't been half bad. Unbeknownst to him, it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him in his entire life, ever. Still blissfully unaware of this fact, John climbed back in his van and went off into the evening, towards the fate that awaited him on Interstate 88, at the hands of two cops named Thomas Everett and Joseph Harris.

"Shaun?" Molly called from the kitchen when she arrived home. "I'm home!"

"In the living room, hon." Shaun's voice came back. Molly walked inside to find him on the sofa, sat up and reading a paperback. He smiled at when she came in, but Molly noted he still looked tired, and his breathing seemed clogged and strained.

"How are you feeling?" She asked, sitting down beside him.

"A lot better," He said, closing the book. "I slept till about 3 o' clock, took Dayquil and took it easy. I reckon I'll be up and about in no time." He scratched his neck absently and Molly saw a number of faint red blotches had formed there, like an allergic reaction or something. Shaun saw her looking and said;

"I saw them too; guess I lay on my neck funny or something."

And that was all the conversation there was about it. They stayed there the rest of the night watching The Tonight Show, Shaun laughing and occasionally coughing into his hand, Molly deliberating over whether to tell him about the Chevy breaking down. She decided not to, in the end. He would have asked her who she got out to fix it, and she would have had to tell him it was Anderson, and God knew what complications might arise from that. They had put all that shit firmly behind them, and their relationship was now back on solid ground. Molly had no intention of putting all that in jeopardy.

Still, it was all a moot point. Both of them only had hours left to live.

Molly was woken by the alarm clock at 7:00am. The first thing she noticed was how her head ached and thumped. The second was the fact that her face felt swollen and strange, as though it had been injected with silicon. The third was the absence of Shaun's breath on her face. She rolled over to face him and saw his eyes were closed.

"Shaun?"

Nothing. She shook him lightly.

"Shaun?"

Shaun's eyes opened, but Molly's relief was short-lived.

* * *

David Trenton was twenty-five, and had lived in Chicago all his life. When he was three, David's father Michael had been shot by a cop in a case of mistaken identity. At the age of seven, his mother had been killed in a hit-and-run. David had gone to an orphanage, where he lived until he was sixteen. The orphanage had been nine years of hell, nothing else to it. When David had finally left, he felt liberated in mind body and soul. He felt truly good for the first time since his mom died. Still, it had not lasted for long. With no close relatives or friends, David had turned to a life of crime to support himself.

So it was that on the morning of September 22nd, David parked his car in the parking lot of a convenience store at 87th and Cottage Grove. He was carrying an empty gym bag in his left hand and his right hand was stowed in the pocket of his jacket, fingers wrapped around the grip of an old .22 caliber pistol. He walked inside the store, and walked up and down the mostly empty aisles, making sure there wasn't an off-duty policeman or anybody who could reasonably put up a fight. He decided there wasn't. With that taken care of, he strode directly up to the cash register, which was situated at the back of the store. The man behind the counter looked up at him, and as David drew the pistol, his eyes widened, and the parts of his face that were not hidden by his beard, paled visibly. A woman nearby dropped her groceries and raised her hands instinctively into the air, as if to assure David that she wasn't carrying a machine-gun or something.

"Open the register." David demanded, gesturing with the pistol. His hands were slippery with sweat, and he had to concentrate intently to stop the pistol shaking. Dammit, if he couldn't show the owner he meant business he would never be taken seriously. To prove he wasn't screwing around, he pointed the pistol at the woman who had raised her hands in the air.

"Open it or I'll shoot her I swear to God I will!" He shouted in a voice that was not quite steady.

"What the hell is going on here?" A man had come round the corner of the aisle and was staring incredulously at the scene before him.

Stay back!" He warned, jerking the pistol slightly towards him. The second it moved away from the cashier, the woman who had surrendered let out a hoarse battle-cry best described as; "YAARGH!"

David made the turn the pistol toward her but then a carrier bag full of soup cans bludgeoned him across the head. He staggered back, blood trickling down his face, but he managed to keep his grip on the .22. He discharged it once into the floor and then felt rather than saw, the cashier lean over the counter and grab his arm in an iron grip. David was horrified; it had all fallen apart. He had been caught. Surely he would go to prison. No more knocking over convenience stores and mugging old ladies to make a living. David found that a bizarre kind of relief was mixed in with his horror. The store owner, the shopper and the robber, grappled almost in slow motion. Moments later, the blond-haired man who had asked what the hell was going on joined the fray. David was about to relinquish his grip on the gun when a small voice said;

"...Help?"

The four of them turned their heads to the center aisle. A young woman was stood there, looking at him. One hand was at her neck, trying to stem the scarlet flood that was cascading down the front of her nightdress. She collapsed to the floor. The woman who swung the bag was the first to run to her.

"The bastard shot her!" The store owner roared.

"I didn't! I didn't!" David protested almost hysterically. He pointed at the bullet hole in the floor.

"Call an ambulance!" The bag swinging woman cried, still crouching over the younger woman. She turned back to her. "Can you hear me hon? What's your name? Who did this to you?"

"Sh...Shaun," The younger woman gurgled. Her quivering hand rose off the floor and pointed towards the front door. She tried to speak again and emitted only a drowning gurgle. She tried again, and eventually made it.

"He's coming..."

Her hand dropped onto the floor, nails clacking against the tile. The blond haired man let go of David and ran to the woman's side, leaving him secured only by the store owner. David had dropped the gun a while ago. Everything had not just fallen apart but reassembled itself into some strange new shape. He felt slow with shock, as if his bloodstream had been filled with sludge. Then, just as things couldn't get any worse a sound came from the parking lot that David had never heard before in his entire life. It was like something you'd to hear a billion years ago, in Jurassic times or some shit like that. A snarling roar that made the hairs on his arms stand to attention.

There was a crashing noise from the front of the store and a man came pelting around the corner of the aisles. The guy's face was stuck up in mad spikes and spirals that David usually associated with a bad night's sleep-In his case, every night. His eyes bulged almost sightlessly and his neck was swollen and blotchy red, as if he had suffered an allergic reaction. The two people attending to the bleeding and unconscious woman jumped away from him instantly, but the man was too slow. The guy, who unknown to David was called Shaun Roper, grabbed him and hauled him to the ground, before jumping on top of him. The store owner shoved David away from him and made to run away, but he slipped on a can of soup, struck his head on the beer cooler and fell down either unconscious or dead. Shaun ran down the aisle, past the two men fighting on the floor. He didn't care if he went to prison. He didn't care if he had to spend his whole life resorting to crime to make a living. All he wanted to do was get out of this store, which had rapidly descended into chaos. The few occupants who had not already fled were fighting for their lives against Shaun Roper and another man who had entered and immediately began attacking people. David didn't give two thirds of a shit, thank you very much. He was almost out; he was practically at the door._ He was almost out!_

A hand closed around his ankle.

David had time to look down and caught a brief glimpse of the young woman who had staggered in here and somehow unleashed all this chaos. Her face was contorted in a savage expression of anger. David felt a searing pain tear through his stomach as she bit his shirt and tore a large part of it away. Crying out in horror and fear, David punched her in the face and resumed his flight to the exit. He could hear the young woman staggering to her feet behind him; could hear her giving chase. David was almost at the exit, and would have made it if he hadn't suddenly tripped over his own intestines, which were currently dangling around his feet. It wasn't just his shirt that had been torn away. David hit the floor with a miserable yell, and began to crawl desperately for the exit. It was only half a meter away, but it may as well have been on Mars. David felt the woman's fingers on his back, and felt the sharpness of her teeth on his neck.

Then he felt no more.

Less than a minute later a squad car pulled up outside the store. A policeman got out, ran inside, and shocked almost to immobility, was caught off guard and killed.

A minute or so after that, another squad car pulled up behind the first, and two cops climbed out, unloosening straps over the holsters of their pistols. One of them went back to the squad car and retrieved a Remington shotgun. A moment later, they went inside.

A.N. Here's the third chapter, sorry it took so long but I have been having some computer problems. From now on, updates should become more regular. Thank you to the people who reviewed, keep them coming :)


	4. Chapter 4

Tom stood frozen with horror, not even aware that his finger was slowly loosening on the Remington's trigger. In front of him was a bloodied, injured woman crouched over a dead body which lay in a fall of soup cans. Two more people lay dead near the cooler, where streaks of blood were diluted by puddles of spilled beer. As Tom watched, the woman tipped her head back, exposing a blood-streaked face that looked as white as marble. She gulped down whatever was in her mouth and then continued eating.

Eating.

Tom felt his mind suddenly drop like an elevator plunging down a shaft.

_Don't worry_, _this isn't happening._ Said part of his mind, likely in a desperate attempt to save itself.

Joe was stood at the other end of the store, about thirty feet away; their eyes locked and Tom saw the same paralyzed horror in Joe's as there no doubt was in his own. There was silence apart from the quiet snarling, tearing sounds coming from the picnic that was happening in the middle of the aisle.

Then the woman stooped eating. She remained frozen, as if in deep thought. Then she slowly turned to face Tom and stared at him vacantly. Her face and hands were smeared with blood. Most of her throat was gone. She screamed shrilly at him, the sound drilling into Tom's ears, and scrambled to her feet. Tom didn't even think; instinct took command of his reflexes and he squeezed the Remington's trigger. The shotgun kicked back against his shoulder and let out a throaty cough that was deafening in the close quarters of the store. The woman's blouse disintegrated in a spray of blood and she staggered backwards, her eyes still locked on him. She screamed again and charged, grabbing him by the shoulders. Tom drove the butt of the shotgun into the woman's face and she tumbled over, her nose breaking with a sound like ice cracking on a frozen pond.

"Stay right there!" Tom shouted, managing to keep the waver out of his voice. "Don't get up!"

She screamed at him again through a mouthful of blood and jumped back up. At the same time there was a tremendous crash as a shelf at the opposite end of the store tipped over, spilling its contents everywhere. The sound of Joe's pistol going off echoed and reverberated off the walls. Tom took two steps back, grimly pumping the shotgun and ejecting the spent shell. He fired at the woman again, and the shotgun took most of her head off. She fell to the floor, motionless.

Tom stared at her for a second and then felt that mental elevator drop a few more floors. Jesus, if he didn't get out of here soon he would go fucking crazy. He heard another gunshot, and understood that his friend was in trouble. He grabbed onto this fact, and used it to pull himself through the thick fog that was clouding his mind. Another gunshot rang out, and he snapped completely out of it. He pumped the shotgun and took off in the direction of the gunshot. At the far end of the store was a door with a sign that declared 'Staff Only'. It was most likely a small storage room of some sort, and it was from this room that the gunshot had emitted. The door stood slightly ajar, and a bloody handprint was smeared diagonally across it.

Tom stepped over and put his shoulder against it, gently nudging it open, the shotgun held at chest level. In sticking with the theme of the day, the lights in the room were off, and the lack of windows meant that it was practically pitch black in there. Tom drew in a deep breath, and stepped into the darkness. At first the darkness was absolute; he could not even see the shotgun suspended in front of him. Then, as he stood there, not even daring to breath, his eyes slowly became accustomed to the darkness and he could make out the dim ghost shapes of shelves and boxes. He slowly probed his hand across the wall, until it came in contact with something that felt like a light switch. He flicked it.

Nothing. The dark remained.

Tom Everett had stopped believing in monsters when he was five, and had started only started believing in them again when he became a cop. The monsters were the rapists, the murderers, the serial killers, the men who stood outside school gates and told kids they could have all the candy they wanted if only they would get in the car. But now, old memories of the monsters he had feared as a child came rushing back, and he was certain that all sorts of unimaginable horrors lurked in the dark corners of this room. A grey creature with enormous, bat-like wings and scythes for hands, rows and rows of razor sharp teeth filling its mouth; A werewolf with blood-streaked fur and yellow claws could rip a man in half with one swipe; a clown with silver eyes and a homicidal grin, holding a bunch of balloons in one hand and a severed head in the other.

_Kid's stuff,_ he thought. There was nothing in there except maybe more of those crazy people. Probably fucked up on some drug or something. Probably just—

_Zombies._

The word came into his head, so crisp and clear it was as if somebody had crept up behind him in the gloom and whispered into his ear. Tom stepped further inside, and the door slowly swung shut behind him. He kept moving, the sound of his footsteps muffled by the dust that lay thickly on the floor. He considered calling out to Joe, and rejected the idea. Who knew what would come running at the sound of his voice? And on the heels of that thought came another one.

_The tac-light, Jesus I forgot the tac-light!_

There was a small tactical light attachment mounted beside the Remington's barrel. Tom reached for it, turned it on, and found himself looking at a cracked, leering face, suspended in the air in front of him. Its eyes seemed to shimmer with lunatic glee and a tongue as long as a cobra flitted from its toothless mouth. Just above it, written in what appeared to be dripping blood, were the words; MONSTER MAGAZINE.

Tom swore under his breath, and turned away from the rack of 20¢ horror magazines he had nearly shot. The light from the shotgun pooled on the ground in a small but powerful beam, and Tom saw drops of crimson blood dotted on the floor. Then, a bone chilling shriek suddenly exploded in his ears, a howling ululation that made his arms break out in gooseflesh. It reverberated around the room, coming from directly in front of him, from his left side, from his right, from behind him. There was no pain in it, no fear. It was a stark, somehow empty sound. The scream reached an ear splitting crescendo, wavered, and died away, leaving a vacuum of silence that was almost deafening. Then there was the sound of something falling over with a heavy _clang._ Tom stood bug-eyed in the darkness, willing his heart to stop beating so fast, as though some unimaginable predator would home in on the sound of it and come running.

Then Tom's ears pricked up at the sound of something moving; something _shifting_. This sound was easier to pinpoint; it was coming directly from the center of the room, low to the ground. It stopped, and then started again, a slow, stealthy slithering, like a sack of laundry being dragged across the floor. And even less discernible was the sound of breathing; a low, wet bubbling punctuated by the occasional sharp intake of breath.

He raised the shotgun to eye level, and stepped towards the source of that sound. The breathing paused for a moment, and when it started again it was even louder, as though the creature making it was panting with anticipation. The slithering sound started to move in his direction. The light from the shotgun fell on boxes, on crates, on splashes of blood that painted the floor. Then it fell on a leg, clad in a sneaker and blue jeans. It was severed just above the knee.

A hand fell on Tom's shoulder.

He whirled around, his finger tightening on the trigger, and the light fell on Joe's face. Tom was about a millimeter away from blowing his friends head off.

"_Jesus you scared the hell out of me._" Tom hissed. "_Are you okay?_"

Joe nodded and put a finger to his lips. He pointed to the center of the room, where the sound was growing closer. He raised his pistol and gestured with it. Tom understood; the two of them could have gotten out of right there and then. Let the backup handle this mess. But curiosity is a powerful emotion. It's the force that has pushed the human race up the long and often bloody road from huddling in caves along the Indus River to ten thousand TV channels and a nuclear missile pointed at every city. And it was the emotion that compelled the two of them to investigate whatever moved in the center of the room.

Tom went first, Joe directly behind him, holding his pistol in both hands. The spots of blood were growing bigger, turning into splashes and splotches that pooled across the floor. Ahead of them, something was shifting in the shadows, apparently low to the ground. The breathing noises grew louder, but were nothing in comparison to the sound of Tom's frantically beating heart.

The light fell on a face. It was a man, lying flat on his stomach, streamers of blood running from his nose and mouth. As the light moved over him, he slowly turned up to stare at them. His mouth opened and he emitted one of those strange, bubbling growls. Tom kept the light moving down the man's body and realized that a mortal subtraction had occurred below his waist; one that accounting for why the man had been slithering around on his stomach like some bizarre slug.

The man's legs were gone.

"Oh shit," Joe breathed. "Oh Jesus Christ…"

"Can you hear me?" Tom asked the man. He felt more scared than he had ever been in his life, but his voice was steady enough.

There was no answer except those hostile growls. The man pulled himself forward on his elbows. Then his arm shot out with unbelievable speed, and closed around Tom's ankle like a mechanical vice. Tom swore and pulled his leg away, the man's jaws clamping shut on thin air where Tom's ankle had been a second ago. Tom squeezed the trigger of the Remington and the room was illuminated by a flash of fire, starkly illuminating the boxes and shelves around them. He pumped the action and fired again, and beside him Joe was blasting away with his Sig Sauer. Lead whined and streaked off the floor, throwing up clouds of smoke and dust. After what seemed like an eternity their guns were empty, and the only sound was the high-pitched ringing in their ears. The legless man lay still, his arms thrown out and most of his head gone. The ground around him was scarred and cratered with bullet holes. The stench of gun smoke filled the air.

Tom turned to Joe, who staring horror-struck at the dead man.

"Are you okay?" Tom asked.

"Yeah, man." Joe breathed. "Fuck, I shot a guy in the head back in the store. He was trying to bite me. You believe that?"

"I can't believe any of this." Tom said, looking at the man who lay on the floor, _sans_ legs. "Did you get bitten?"

"What?" Joe asked, confused.

"_Did you get bitten?_" Tom repeated urgently.

"N-no, I don't think so." Joe said, checking himself over. "Why?"

Tom imagined himself saying; _Ah no reason, just in case he was a zombie. _Instead he just shook his head.

"C'mon, let's get out of here." He suggested. "This place is giving me the creeps."

They turned to leave, the atmosphere of the room becoming too much to bear. They swept the doors of the storage room open and found themselves staring down the barrels of five automatic weapons. Behind the raised guns were the grim faces of a SWAT team. Red lasers strobed the air in front of them and Tom knew that at least one of them now lay directly in the middle of his forehead. If any member of the SWAT team applied so much as another inch of pressure on the trigger of their weapon, it would spit a 5.56mm round straight into Tom's brain.

"Officer Thomas Everett," He said, speaking slowly and clearly. "This is my partner, Officer Joseph Harris."

The SWAT team leader glanced at their badges and nodded. The team lowered their weapons and Tom's heart resumed something similar to its normal rhythm.

"What happened here?" The team leader asked sternly.

Tom recounted the story of what had happened, from when they stepped inside the store, to when they dispatched the legless man who had been crawling around in the storage room, his face growing slightly redder as he went on, realizing how ridiculous the story sounded out loud, not to mention completely unbelievable. Joe confirmed everything he said, and when it was over the SWAT team was looking at them with emotions that ranged from nervousness to downright alarm.

"Okay," the team leader said. He spoke into his radio. "Two officers comin' out."

"Head outside, talk to Sergeant Bryson." He said. He gestured to his team and a moment later they advanced into the dark storage room. Tom and Joe walked down to the front of the store and stepped outside, into a sunlight that was almost blinding after the cold darkness of the storage room. After a second, Tom's vision cleared, and he could see two SWAT trucks parked nose to nose in the middle of the parking lot. A handful of cops surrounded them, guns drawn and pointed warily at the store. A blonde-haired woman with a stern face trotted briskly towards them.

"Sergeant Bryson?" Joe asked as she drew closer.

"That's me." She said. "What happened in there?"

Tom recounted the story yet again as they walked across the parking lot. The all clear crackled on Bryson's radio and she signaled to the nearby EMT's, who quickly hurried inside the store. She stopped him when he reached the part about the legless man.

"Wait a second," She demanded. "You're telling me this guy had his legs ripped off? By what?"

"I don't know, ma'am." Tom shrugged. "We probably won't know until the forensics guys get here."

"And this guy with his legs torn off was just crawling around like nothing happened?"

"I'm afraid so."

Bryson's radio squawked; "Sergeant, we have survivors in here."

"Get them out of there." Bryson ordered, before turning back to Tom. "And he tried to attack you; to bite you, just like the woman?"

"Yes," Joe said. "We were both there, we both saw it."

Sergeant Bryson crossed her arms and surveyed them warily. Tom could see where this was going. There were people in the world that wouldn't believe the truth until they saw it with their own eyes. Some people wouldn't even believe it then.

"Sergeant, we've told you," Tom said, as calmly as he could when the image of the man with no legs kept rising, unbidden in his mind. "We don't know why it happened, but it happened. Check the CCTV, you'll see it all."

"Listen, I appreciate you guys must be under stress; it's not a pretty scene in there. But that doesn't-"

"Ah, Sergeant," The voice on the radio interrupted. "I think we might have a problem here…"

Bryson ignored it, and kept talking; "That doesn't mean that you can expect me to believe some cockamamie story about how you were attacked by…what? Bunch of walking corpses?"

"Sarge," The voice on the radio said urgently. "I really think you should see this!"

"No," Joe said. "But they must have been fucked up on some drug or something, it's the only explanation." It was same explanation the two had proposed to explain John Anderson's sudden bout of cannibalism, and it was one that they had already largely rejected. But if that wasn't the explanation, then what was?

Sergeant Bryson's gaze never faltered. "Well I'm sorry officer," she said. "But I still find this very hard to…"

"_BRYSON FOR GOD'S SAKE!"_ The radio screamed.

"WHAT?" She yelled, grabbing it. Her question was answered a second later when one of the store's plate glass windows exploded. Glass showered on the pavement as one of the SWAT team members came flying out, a growling man in a denim jacket and ripped, bloody jeans on top of him.

A cop stood nearby ran to help him, pulling the man off and pinning him to the ground. The doors of the store slammed open, and a young man wearing a coat and bloodied T-shirt ran out. The lower part of his shirt was completely torn off, and it took Tom a second to notice that wasn't all that had been torn. What looked like the guys intestines were flying around his ankles. His face was contorted in an insane expression of madness that Tom had seen far too often in the past two days. A number of cops chased him out, barking futile orders for him to halt.

One of SWAT guys dropped to one knee and fired off a round, punching a hole through the guys leg. He didn't even seem to feel it, although if he could seem to ignore the fact that he had been disemboweled, it was a sure bet that he could ignore the bullet wound in his thigh. He slammed an EMT into the side of a parked car hard enough to make it rock slightly. The EMT raised his hands in a desperate attempt to protect his face, and his attacker bit down on it, _hard._

"_Son of a bitch!_" Tom heard the EMT cry. He drove his head forward into his attackers face and began to rain merciless punches down on him until he was eventually hauled off by a colleague. Tom couldn't see for sure, but it looked like two of his fingers were gone. The disemboweled man launched himself to his feet, and a panicked cop nearby emptied his pistol into the man's head. He threw his arms out grandiosely and collapsed on the asphalt.

The man in the denim jacket managed to free himself from the policeman who was restraining him, and bit down on his captors arm. Tom was there by this time, and he raised his foot and slammed it into the man's face, as the policeman who had been holding him tumbled off, clutching his wounded arm and yelling. Tom wrestled the man to the ground, and a moment later Joe and Sergeant Bryson jumped in, grabbing an arm each and pinning him down. The man thrashed wildly, his eyes rolling madly in their sockets, runners of blood escaping his mouth and rolling down his neck, which had a swollen, blotchy look. The SWAT team leader they had met back in the store hurried over to help them. His left arm had been badly scratched and was bleeding profusely.

"The people in the store," He panted. "We thought they were all dead. Couple of 'em started moving. We ran over to help them and…they attacked us."

With great effort the four of them hauled the thrashing man to his feet, dragged him across the parking lot and threw him in the back of a waiting police van. He stumbled inside, turned around, and ran back at them. Bryson firmly slammed the doors in his face and a moment later the doors were being pounded upon with heavy, arrhythmic blows that made the whole van shake. Tom looked around at the parking lot, wondering how the fuck this had all happened. The paramedics looking over the people who had been injured; the police hurrying around like flies, not entirely sure what they were supposed to be doing; a cop hurriedly covering the gutted body of one of the crazed attackers; stretchers being set up; finally, Tom's gaze came to rest on Sergeant Bryson, who was watching the whole scene with dazed horror and confusion.

"Still don't believe me?"

Taken from ABC 7 News, aired at 6:00pm on the evening of September 22.

A convenience store in Chicago was the scene of a violent incident this morning, in which several people were killed, and several more wounded. Details are sketchy, but it is believed the incident was an attempted robbery that went horribly wrong. Chief Andrew Meyers of the Chicago Police Department made a statement in which he confirmed that an incident had taken place, however he was reluctant to give details. When asked why the police were not more forthcoming with details of the incident, he claimed "We just want to be sure of all the facts". It has also been reported that relatives of those who were killed in the altercation have not been allowed to view their bodies. When pressed on this, Chief Meyers made no comment.

In other news, local hospitals have reported an increase in patients suffering cold and flu-like symptoms. Doctor Andrea Carter, Chief of Medicine at Mercy General Hospital, said that a possible flu epidemic could be in the early stages. She advised people in at-risk groups, such as the very young and the elderly, to get flu shots and stay at home if they feel unwell.

A.N. Okay, here's chapter four, finally! Thanks for the reviews and please keep them coming.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five

It was about 7:30pm when Tom turned his car into the driveway of Joe's house. It was the night of September 22, and although the day had been mild, the night was cold with the rumor of winter on the horizon. The moon briefly appeared, casting long, pale shadows across the ground before hiding its face again behind a slow moving cloud.

Tom stepped out of the car, glancing quickly around the street. The houses stood silent, drapes closed and doors safely shut against the night. The wind whispered secretly in the trees that lined the sidewalk. A lone cat slinked past, regarded him with bored feline detachment, and disappeared, merging with the shadows. Tom trudged up the front porch and rang the doorbell. After a few seconds, the hall light was switched on, and a cautious voice called;

"Who is it?"

"It's Tom." He replied.

The door opened, and Joe was standing there, looking pale and tired.

"Hey, buddy." He said. "Come on in."

Tom stepped inside and followed Joe into the kitchen, where several empty bottles of beer were lined up like soldiers on parade.

"You want a drink?" Joe said, checking the fridge. "I've got Bud, Coors or Narragansett."

Tom said he wouldn't say no to a Bud, and drew up an empty chair at the table. Beside him, dark pressed against the glass, broken only by a rectangle of light from a neighbor's window. Tom took a gulp of his beer and gestured to the empty bottles lined up on the table.

"You been drinking long?"

Joe smiled bitterly. "I've been trying to get drunk." He said. "I think if I get drunk, maybe I won't keep seeing that guy crawling around with his legs off every time I close my eyes."

Tom nodded, drinking thoughtfully. The Patrol Sergeant, Harrison, had given them both a two-day vacation (or perhaps "suspension" would have been a better word) whilst the events of the last two days were reviewed. Now they had nothing to do but sit and mope around, while an investigation took place.

"Is Sandra home?" Tom asked.

"No," Joe said. "Her shift ends in about half an hour; sooner she gets home the better."

"You think it's dangerous out there now?" Tom asked, trying to sound casual.

"Might be." Joe said.

"So you think there could be more people like that out there?" Tom pressed on.

"Anything's possible." Joe contemplated. "Especially if they are…"

"Are what?" Tom said instantly. They were close to discussing the unspoken theory that had hung between them all day.

"Nothing." Joe muttered.

"Zombies, right?" Tom said, taking the plunge and hating the sound of the word coming out of his mouth. "That's what you were going to say, isn't it?"

"No." Joe mumbled, concentrating intently on the bottle in front of him.

"Oh come on, man." Tom said. "Anderson, the people in the store, they all had the same symptoms. They attacked anything that moved, they ate people, and they didn't die until they got shot in the head. Isn't that supposed to be, I dunno…the dictionary definition of a zombie?"

"Zombies aren't real."

"I thought the same thing, but after nearly being eaten twice in the past 24 hours I have to reevaluate my fucking beliefs." Tom leaned closer to Joe across the table. "Listen, something bad is going down here. What about those guys from the PHS this morning? We both know they weren't testing for rabies, so what were they testing for?"

"_Zombies aren't real!_" Joe exclaimed, waving his arms wildly. "They're made-up! They're for films and books!"

"Then what do _you _think's going on?" Tom cut in. "Huh?"

Joe's eyes flitted around the kitchen, as though he was hoping the answer would present itself somewhere within the room.

"Maybe…" He said slowly, "Maybe there _is _a virus…or something, that makes people go crazy, maybe they even act like zombies-"

"That's not it," Tom overrode firmly. "And you know it. I bet even that stubborn bitch Bryson's got suspicions after what happened in the parking lot."

Joe opened his mouth to say something, then the sound of the front door shutting came from the hallway. Both men, who hadn't been aware of how on edge they were, flinched, and Tom's hand nearly knocked his beer off the table.

A second later, Joe's fiancée Sandra swept into the room, still wearing her nurse's scrubs.

"Hey hon," Joe said. Tom noticed that the empty bottles had miraculously disappeared off the table. "How was your day?"

Sandra smiled tiredly. "I've had better. Heck of a lot of injured people today." Tom didn't know why that sentence would make his blood run cold, but it did. She and Joe exchanged a kiss, and she frowned. "Have you been drinking?"

"No." Joe said earnestly.

"Liar," Sandra said affectionately. She turned to Tom and regarded him kindly. "Hey Tom, how are you holding up?" Joe had told her what happened on the Interstate yesterday.

"I'm okay, thanks." Tom smiled. "Just trying to take it easy."

"There was nothing else you could have done," she said briskly, heading back into the hallway and returning with bags of groceries. "From what Joe said, that guy would have killed you both."

"Yeah, I guess so." Tom said. "Sandra, what did you mean when you said there have been a lot of injured people today?"

"Oh, you know." Sandra said. "Assault, violent robbery, attempted murder. We usually get it all the time, but there was a lot more of it today for some reason. And, I heard there was some kind of robbery at a store in the city today; you guys weren't involved in that as well were you?"

Tom and Joe exchanged nervous glances and said nothing.

"_Were you?_" She asked, turning to them.

"No…" Joe mumbled. "Well, kind of…"

"Well that's my cue to go," Tom announced, standing up. "I'll see myself out."

"See ya buddy." Joe said.

"Bye Tom." Sandra said, still looking at her fiancé with curiosity.

Tom left the house and closed the door behind him, silencing Joe's explanation of the events that had occurred that day. He wondered how much Sandra would believe. He wondered how much he believed himself.

* * *

Tom came downstairs and shuffled into his living room at 7:00am the next morning, the morning of September 23. Ordinarily he would have been getting ready for work, but as Sergeant Harrison had put him on temporary suspension, there was nothing for him to do. He had barely seen the point in getting out of bed. Yawning, he fell down on the sofa and reached for the remote, which lay next to a framed photo of him and Vicki standing in front of the Eiffel Tower on their holiday to Paris last year. Tom smiled, feeling some consolation in the fact that she was in Maine at the moment, safely out of harm's way from whatever the hell was going on here. Wondering what he was going to tell her if she rang, he absentmindedly switched on the TV, surfing for news until he found one of the local stations.

A middle-aged news reporter, who the caption at the bottom of the screen identified as one Timothy Flanders, was stood in front of a shattered storefront window. Glass sparkled on the concrete sidewalk like a spilled sack of diamonds, and the burglar alarm mounted above the window flashed intermittently. The sign above the shattered window read; "Protecting the Second Amendment Since 1984."

"Exactly what has caused this sudden outbreak of civil unrest in this normally quiet neighborhood remains unclear." The reporter was saying gravely into the camera. "As you can see behind me, a number of stores have been looted, including firearms stores, electrical stores and sporting goods stores. I spoke to Chicago Police lieutenant Andrew Fox earlier, who voiced his suspicions that the violence was most likely racially motivated. Although this cannot be substantiated at this time, one thing remains certain-"

Tim Flanders broke off suddenly as a young kid wearing a White Sox cap burst into the frame, the spots of acne on his face standing out in stark relief to his skin, which was as pale as milk. He grabbed the camera in both hands and said;

"I'll tell you what remains certain, ladies and gentlemen." He leaned in until his face filled the entire shot. "We are all going…to die." He shrieked laughter at the camera and took off up the street, still cackling madly. The camera turned back from his flight to Tim the news reporter, who seemed unsure of exactly what the fuck had just happened. When he realized the camera was pointing at him, he quickly regained his composure.

"As you can see, the violence has had a profound effect on the people in this community. It remains unclear whether the firearms store behind me was looted with the purpose of instigating the violence or defending against it."

The screen cut back to the studio, where a man and a woman sat behind a news desk.

"Tim, has there been any word on the number of injuries or fatalities, yet?" The male news anchor asked, putting on his most solemn expression.

"No official word as of yet, Bob." He replied as the camera cut back to him. "But in the past ten minutes I have heard gunshots at least five times; Sometimes from at least three blocks away, sometimes as close as the next street. Reports have come in indicating the injured have been taken to Mercy General Hospital, but as to whether anyone has been killed it is too early to-" He broke off again and looked to the right. The camera followed his gaze, coming to rest on a street corner as a throng of at least thirty people burst out from the street, pelting towards, and then past the camera. Their eyes had the terrified look of people trying to run from some inescapable nightmare. The camera panned slowly around to follow their progress, then swung quickly back to Tim Flanders, who seemed to be weighing up the potential damage to his career that could result from him dropping his microphone and running after them. Somewhere off camera, there was a volley of gunshots. The sound of smashing glass. Then a scream came through the speakers of Tom's television; raw and agonizing, brimming with misery. It spiraled up and up and Tom was sure it would go on forever when in was suddenly cut off. In its place came a series of predatory howls and shrieks that made the hairs on the back of Tom's neck stand up. Tim Flanders, it appeared, needed no further encouragement. Fuck his career. He threw down his microphone and took off after the fleeing mob. His cameraman likewise threw down the camera, where it landed pointing up at the sky, and ran after him, the slap of his shoes on the sidewalk slowly fading into the distance.

Tom's phone began to ring, and he jumped, startled out of the almost trance-like state the TV had put him in. He muted it with the remote and leaned across his sofa to grab the phone off its cradle.

"Hello?"

"Everett, is that you?" A gruff voice asked. "It's Sergeant Harrison."

"Yeah, it's me, sarge." Tom replied, muting the TV, which had switched back to the studio.

"I take it you've been watching the news," Sergeant Harrison said. When Tom grunted in reply he said, "Listen, I know I said you could have the day off after what happened yesterday, but I wasn't expecting this. Morgan Park's fucking imploding and I need-"

"I'll be there, sarge." Tom said. All sleepiness had fallen from him like a cloak. "An hour at the most."

"Thanks, Everett." Harrison said. "I knew I could count on you."

Tom put the phone down and ran to get dressed.

* * *

The drive to the station was uneventful. Although ambulances and emergency vehicles raced past him a couple of times, he could see no sign of violence on the streets. Whatever was happening, it was contained to Morgan Park, for now.

When he arrived at the station, he found almost everyone assembled in the main office, staring raptly at the TV that was bolted to the wall. On it, a reporter was being jostled by a crowd of people, all moving hurriedly in the same direction.

"No sound?" Tom asked one of the nearby cops.

The cop held up the remote, which was missing its volume button.

"Figures…" Tom muttered.

On TV, the crowd became more frantic, spurred on by an unseen threat from off-camera. The camera was dropped to the ground where it lay on its side, showing legions of shoes stampeding across the sidewalk.

"Is there no fucking sound on this piece of shit?" One of the cops cried exasperatedly.

"Sylvester dropped the remote," Another replied. "Blame him."

On the television, the last of the running feet were gone, revealing only a stretch of deserted street. Tom was about to suggest changing the channel when drops of blood began to patter down on the sidewalk. A couple of them landed on the camera lens and dripped slowly down, leaving trails of crimson behind them. Unconsciously, the people assembled in the room leaned forward, as if in horrified anticipation of what was to come next.

On live TV, being beamed directly into the homes of thousands of Americans, a person's hand, severed at the wrist, fell onto the sidewalk and lay with its fingers pointing in the air like a dead crab.

"Jesus!" Someone cried.

One of the cops jumped up from his chair as though he had been given an electric shock, and bolted out of the room, his hand over his mouth. Tom had a sudden vision of thousands of people around the country watching TV and suddenly choking on their cereal. The room dissolved into a frenzy of almost hysterical conversation.

"Damn, we've got to go into the middle of that!"

"What the frick just happened?"

"Is that a goddam _hand_?"

Tom saw Sergeant Harrison rise to his feet and switch off the TV.

"Okay everyone, listen up!" He shouted over the noise. "We've been put in charge of helping to enforce a perimeter around the area. As of now we don't know why these people are rioting, but we do know they are attacking everything in sight, and as you just saw they are armed and dangerous. The riot police will move in firing tear gas to break up the rioters and arrest the ringleaders, continually forcing them into the center of the district. Roadblocks are going to be set up to limit movement of the rioters, except in areas where ambulances will need to reach the wounded. Orders from the Superintendent are that you all have permission to use lethal force to hold the perimeter and defend yourselves. Any questions?"

There were none.

"Okay, let's move out!"

A caravan of twelve police cars left the station shortly after, at 8:45am. In the distance, two columns of pale smoke were rising over the buildings. Tom was driving the fifth car of the convoy, and Joe was sat next to him, talking excitedly.

"Did you see that guy's fucking hand hit the pavement?" he said. "I mean, Jesus Christ!"

"Yeah, I saw it." Tom replied, his eyes scanning the streets, which were bustling with the usual early-morning activity. More faces that unusual appeared strained and worried, and these were the people who, Tom guessed, had seen the report on TV.

"I mean, I nearly lost my breakfast!" Joe declared.

"So now do you believe me?" Tom asked, referring to the discussion they had last night.

"Do I believe that zombies are attacking Chicago? No, dude. But like I said yesterday," he continued, cutting through Tom's protests. "I think it's possible there's a virus or something that's making people _act _like zombies. Sound about right?"

"Not really."

"Anyway," Joe continued. "If there is a virus, how long do you think it's gonna take for anyone in government to find out?"

"Not long." Tom surmised. "If they don't already know."

The cars turned into the intersection on West 111th Street, and parked on the curb. Several squads of riot police and a K-9 unit were already there. The street was full of people all moving in the same direction, not exactly running, but definitely not strolling either. The cops there were trying to keep order, shouting instructions through bullhorns and directing the flow of traffic. Tom's eyes roved over the crowd, and he noticed that many of them were nursing injuries on arms, legs, shoulders or necks. The seriously injured were being attended to by EMT's.

"Okay you two," Harrison called. "Take positions on the roadblock."

Tom and Joe hurried down the street, in the direction that the crowds were streaming from. At one end of the intersection, a roadblock consisting of crowd control barriers and sawhorses had been hastily set up, blocking off the southern part of 111th, which bore the recent scars of the rioting. From maybe a block down came the sound of people yelling urgently, following by the baritone blare of a truck's horn. Tom un-holstered his Glock 35, and turned to Joe.

"You ready for this?"

"Yeah," Joe said. "No sweat."

The riot police moved past the roadblock and formed a line across the road, crouching low behind their shields. The dogs barked crazily, slobbering madly, their hackles rising as though they had caught the scent of some unseen attacker. The wind freshened and for a moment Tom smelled it as well, a ripe odor of corruption that reminded him of spoiled pork. Joe and several of the other officers stationed on the roadblock wrinkled their noses.

"You smell that?" Joe asked, making a face. "Smells like…rotten meat."

"Yeah, I smell it." Tom said. He was glancing around the street, his hearth thudding with anticipation. The riot cops moved up, blocking their view of the road with an impenetrable line of shields. The roadblock was continually reinforced by cops, some of them carrying shotguns and automatic weapons.

"C'mon you bastards." A voice on Tom's right said. He turned and saw Darryl Bernhard, a 6ft 2 rhino who had once headbutted a woman who had asked him 'how the weather was up there'. Bernhard, who could have been considered the very definition of police brutality, was holding his shotgun and almost panting with eager anticipation.

Suddenly, somebody shouted "Here they come!"

Tom heard the irregular thud of shoes on the ground as people began to stream onto the street. Faces flashed intermittently between the shoulders of the police on the front line, contorted into expressions of insanity Tom no longer believed were human. There was the clamor of metal hitting flesh as the cops used their shields to stop the attackers, and then wielded their nightsticks in an attempt to drive them back. There was no laughter coming from the attackers, no yelling, and no chants of "The whole world is watching." There was only bizarre gurgling and snarling noises and the occasional full on howl, as though these people were possessed by the spirits of wolves.

The line of cops dissolved as the onslaught crashed over them like a rancid wave on a beach. Blood flew, bones were broken, men were pulled down with their attackers going for their faces and throats. The attackers that didn't join in the melee headed straight for the second line, which opened fire immediately. Pistol shots, the blast of shotguns and the occasional burst of automatic fire added to the whirlwind of sound. Tom sighted down his Glock at a man who was running at him and pulled the trigger. The bullet passed directly through his head and he fell to the ground, his body immediately trampled by his fellow attackers, who were still coursing up the street.

"Go for the head!" Tom yelled, but in the confusion he doubted anyone heard him. Joe was reloading his pistol frantically; Darryl Bernhard was unloading his shotgun into the fray seemingly at random, not caring whether he was shooting friend or foe. The first of the attackers reached the front line and began clambering over the barriers. Some simply jumped straight over them like athletes jumping over hurdles, displaying amazing speed and agility for people who were, in many cases, harboring grievous injuries.

A kid of about seven climbed over the barricades and landed at Tom's feet, growling up at him with blood-streaked teeth. He reached for Tom's legs with hands that were hooked into claws. Grimacing, Tom swung his foot out and kicked him in the chest, sending him flying into one of the sawhorses. He looked up just in time to see a middle aged man who had been about to bite into his face get shot in the head by a well-placed bullet from Joe's pistol.

And still they kept coming. As the mad onslaught continued and the cops at the roadblock realized the danger they were in, the second line collapsed as well as its defenders turned and fled back to their cars. Tom fired his Glock at one of the attackers, missed, and began to quickly reload.

"Leave it!" Joe bellowed. "We've got to get out of here!"

Tom looked up, saw how truly fucked they all were, and nodded. He and Joe raced back to their car, surrounded by the remainder of the defenders. They were halfway there when Tom tripped on something and landed on his ass, rolling out of the way just in time to avoid being trampled by cops running back to their vehicles. Reflecting that this was a pretty dumbass way to die, Tom twisted around to see a man towering over him, seeming over ten feet tall from where Tom sat on the ground. He lower half of his mouth had been torn away, exposing his jawbone and making it seem as though he were grinning down at Tom. Remembering his Glock was empty, looking desperately for something he could use as a weapon, Tom's eyes fell on the thing he had tripped over; some cop's discarded MP5.

_If it's full, I'll live,_ Tom thought. _If it's empty, I'll probably die._

He snatched it up from the ground and pulled the trigger just as the man was reaching down to him. The MP5 stuttered only briefly before what remained in the magazine was gone, but it was enough. The assailant fell back with head riddled with bullets, and Tom felt a hand grab him by the shoulder and pull him to his feet.

"Let's go! Let's go!" Joe shouted hoarsely.

Carrying the MP5 by the strap, Tom ran back to their vehicle, which was still parked on the curb. He made it to the driver's side, flung the door open and jumped in a second before one of the crazies made a grab for him. Tom slammed the door shut just as Joe climbed in and did the same.

"Drive, drive!" Joe yelled, slamming on the dashboard.

The cops who had made it back to their cars had the same idea, and were pulling away at breakneck speed. Tom threw the car into gear and put his foot down. The tires screamed and the car shot away from the pavement, scattering crazy people like ninepins. Out of the rearview mirror Tom saw one of the police cars lose control and plow through a crowd of people before slamming through a store window. A ball of fire, too bright to look at, flared up out of the shop window, and Tom felt as though a giant had nudged the rear wheels of their own vehicle. He fought to control the skid, and twisted the steering wheel sharply to the left, driving down another street. He glanced into the rearview mirror to see if any of the crazy people were following them, and Joe shouted: "Look out, look out!"

A man the size of a small rhino had landed on the windshield. It was Darryl Bernhard, the famous headbutter, staring in at them with pale eyes, blood running from his mouth and mixing with a ragged gash on his neck. Tom slammed the brakes on and Bernhard slid down off the windshield, his hands grasping at thin air. Around the corner something exploded, and Tom guessed that more vehicles were now going up like 4th of July firecrackers.

"Can we please go now?" Joe asked faintly. His face was dazed and uncomprehending, as if he had just been sucker punched.

"Yeah." Tom said. The retreating police cars drove past them, probably heading back to the station. Twelve had left, but only five were coming back. Feeling like a man trapped in the quicksand of some grinding nightmare, Tom drove after them.

A.N. Okay, here's chapter 5! Please leave a review and let me know what you think.


	6. The Hospital, Part I

Chapter Six – The Hospital, Part I

"_Attention all units, proceed to County General Hospital immediately, repeat; proceed to County General Hospital immediately."_

"That's where Sandra works!" Joe declared, his already pale face going paper white.

"Jesus…" Tom muttered, flicking the turn stalk and turning the car from its original route to the station in the direction of County General Hospital. Ahead of them, the other police cars, looking scratched, dented and bloody, were doing the same.

"So," Joe said. "Zombies, huh?"

"Yeah, I guess so." Tom replied. "I don't see _how_ that can be it, but from everything that's happened so far, it's the best explanation."

"What would do it, though?" Joe asked. "Some kind of virus?"

"Probably," Tom said, not taking his eyes off the road. Rush hour traffic was in full swing, and adding to that the higher than usual number of emergency vehicles on the streets, it was becoming difficult to avoid an accident. "Someone gets bitten, they turn into a zombie, they bite somebody else, and so on and so on. At least that's what happens in the movies."

"This doesn't feel like a fucking movie." Joe groaned. "Christ on fire, what would make a virus like that in the first place? Or who?"

"Not a clue." Tom said. ". At any rate, it doesn't matter right now, we just need to keep our heads and concentrate on staying alive."

"Yeah, I hear you."

Tom turned the car up onto the hill that led to the hospital. He could see no signs of smoke yet, which was a relief, although when they reached the top of the hill and turned onto Denver Avenue their relief was short lived. The hospital's parking lot was crammed with vehicles. Tom couldn't see even one remaining parking space amongst the sea of cars that stretched away to the hospitals main entrance. Car horns called to each other across the asphalt jungle, and the scream of a passing ambulance temporarily blotted out all other sound.

"Oh this can't be fucking good." Tom sighed. "C'mon."

Tom parked the car, and they climbed out and headed towards the other cops who were gathering on the sidewalk. The cops were angrily shouting and gesticulating at Sergeant Harrison, who held his hands up in pacification.

"Okay, calm down people." He said, wiping a smear of blood from below his eye. "You think I counted on nearly being ripped apart back there?"

"Those people were not fucking normal!" Roared one of the cops. "This guy with no arms came running at me for God's sake! _Running_! What's a guy like that doing up and around anyways?"

There were cries of agreement. Sergeant Harrison held his hands up again until it quieted.

"Listen, I don't know what the hell's going on here." He said. "But we have orders to assist in maintaining security at the hospital until other units get here, okay? Now move!"

* * *

Like the parking lot, the waiting room of County General Hospital was full to capacity. People sat in chairs, lay slumped against the walls, and milled about like herds of cows before a storm. Some of them were seriously injured, whilst others had smaller wounds on their arms or legs. Doctors and nurses ran this way and that, doing what they could to help the patients, trying to find the most seriously injured people to be sent off to the ER. In the time since Tom's unit had gotten here, several more reinforcements had arrived, and now cops stood at positions around the room, looking for the first sign of trouble.

The waiting room was filled with the sound of people calling to doctors, seeking help for friends and loved ones, but the most pervasive sound was constant, repetitive coughing and sneezing. A sudden bright flash of fear shot through Tom's mind; what if this thing could be spread from person to person as easily as flu, or the common cold? Well if that was the case, they were already screwed. Tom exchanged a glance with Joe, and could tell from the look in his eyes that he was thinking the same. A couple of minutes ago, Joe had found his fiancée Sandra at the main desk. She had been relieved to see him, but the constant flow of people seeking treatment meant that she couldn't stay for long, and she quickly had to run off to see a man who had been stretchered in with severe lacerations to his chest.

Now, Joe walked over to where Tom stood by the front desk, keeping any eye out for any signs of people turning violent.

"This place sounds like a fucking TB ward." He muttered. "How long till these people start getting…bitey?"

"I don't know." Tom said quietly.

"Here's what I think." Joe suggested. "I think we should grab Sandra and get the hell out of here; get the hell out of Chicago."

"You and Sandra should go." Tom said. "I'm staying."

"That's crazy," Joe argued. "If this thing spreads around the city they'll be nowhere to hide. Jesus, it could spread around the whole country."

"I'm staying." Tom said calmly. "I can't just run off; not yet anyway, not when I can still help."

"Dammit." Joe said. "Sandra's probably thinking the same thing, anyway."

Tom's attention turned to the other end of the waiting room as the glass doors slid open and five men strode inside. They were wearing military uniforms, body armor and helmets. All of them were carrying guns, but what alarmed Tom the most was the fact that they were wearing gas masks over their faces. They stood silently near the entrance, briefly surveying the situation around the room. One of them, the leader apparently, motioned to the others and they took off past the main desk and down a corridor, the rumbling echo of their boots slowly fading away.

"Who the hell were they?" Joe asked. "The Army?"

"Whoever they are, they brought some friends." Tom pointed out, as another team of men walked through the door. Like the previous one, they were similarly clothed and armed with some heavy-duty weaponry. One of them was toting what looked like an M240 machine gun. The people assembled in the waiting room paused whatever they were doing and watched nervously as the soldiers passed down a corridor. No sooner had they left than another squad of soldiers appeared, and followed the first one, paying no heed to the curious glances they were receiving.

His curiosity aroused, Tom held down the button on the radio clipped to his shirt and spoke into it.

"Uh Sarge, this is Unit 16, I'm seeing soldiers entering the hospital by way of the main entrance, do you know anything about that? Over."

There was a pause, and then the crackling reply from Harrison; "Negative Unit 16, I don't know anything, but Lieutenant Garcia is in charge of security here, I understand he's meeting some of them along with the hospital's chief of medicine right now. Over."

"Copy that; Unit 16 out." Tom turned back to Joe. "C'mon, let's go for a walk."

Joe nodded and they left the waiting room and walked down one of the corridors, which was almost as crowded. They passed one room where a group of doctors and nurses were crowded around a bed, attending to a man whose life support machines were beeping frantically, another one where the bed was empty apart from a large blood stain on the pillow. A grim-eyed surgeon raced past them with his gloves and the front of his scrubs splashed with blood. Halfway up the corridor they pressed themselves flat against the wall as a bleeding man was stretchered past by an ambulance crew. On the TV at a nurse's station, the Secretary of Homeland Security was answering questions from a gaggle of journalists who were almost foaming at the mouth with excitement. The

"This isn't good, man." Joe said. "This place is going crazy. What are we going to do?"

"I'm going to talk to that guy." Tom said, nodding over to where one of the soldiers stood by a door. "Maybe he can tell us what's going on."

"Or he could shoot us." Joe said, eyeing the soldiers M16.

Cautiously, Tom walked over to where the soldier stood. He ignored them entirely until Tom clearly his throat, and asked;

"Uh, excuse me." Tom said, feeling like a jackass. "You couldn't tell me what the hell's going on around here, could you?"

The soldier turned to face him, the eye lenses on his gas mask catching the light.

"There's a riot currently taking place in the city, sir." The soldier said, his voice slightly muffled. "We're from 1st Battalion, Illinois National Guard; we're here to help provide security."

Tom thought about asking the soldier why if that was so, he wasn't wearing the National Guard shoulder sleeve insignia. In fact, why wasn't he wearing any kind of insignia at all? Instead he thanked the soldier and returned to where Joe was stood by the nurse's station.

"What did he say?" Joe asked.

"That there's a riot going in the city." Tom replied. "As if I didn't fucking know that. They're from the National Guard; here to help with security."

"There's something I don't like about them." Joe said, shaking his head.

"That makes two of us." Tom replied. "C'mon, let's see if-"

The radio cut him off mid-sentence, emitting a loud squawk of static as a voice said;

"_All units this is Unit 4, need immediate assistance in the ER, repeat; immediate assistance in the ER! Jesus, look at that fucker!"_

There was another screech of static as a second radio transmission cuts across the first.

"_This is Unit 32, requesting immediate assistance outside the operating theater, we have a civilian down, repeat; civilian down._"

"Aw fuck, it's happening." Joe said, looking warily around. "Shit, where the hell is Sandra?"

"_All units, this is base-"_ The transmission began, but immediately drowned in a sea of unintelligible static. Tom twisted the dial on the radio, hoping the transmission would clear further down the band. He received nothing but the hiss of white noise, behind which lurked muffled sounds and the garbled suggestion of what might have been words.

"My damn radio's busted." Joe complained, fiddling with the dial on his own radio.

"No, mine's gone too." Tom told him. "It's almost like the signal's being jammed."

The two men looked at each other, and a silent theory passed across the air between them. They turned back to where the soldier had been stood, only to find him gone, his spot empty. There was a muffled crash over their heads as something toppled over on the floor above them; a gurney or a cart loaded with surgical equipment, maybe. It was followed by the sound of muffled voices shouting unintelligible words.

"What the fucks going on up there?" Joe asked. Several of the people in the corridor were looking towards the ceiling anxiously as they passed to and fro, as the sounds of commotion increased. Tom was already un-holstering his Glock when the first gunshots rang out upstairs. He saw that they would have only one chance to avert a panic, and an ensuing stampede for the exit.

"Okay people," He called, raising his voice. "Keep calm; let's move quickly and calmly to the exit."

The people in the corridor, patients, visitors and hospital staff alike, turned in the direction of the waiting room, and an all-out charge for the exits might have been avoided if the hospitals fire alarm had not chosen that exact second to go off. Panic shot through the corridor as its inhabitants nerves, which had been tuned up and up like guitar strings by the events of the morning, finally snapped. Tom was jostled and elbowed by the wave of people coursing to the exits.

"Ah hell, we've got a situation down here!" Joe desperately spoke into his dead radio. "Worthless piece of crap!"

"C'mon!" Tom called to him. "Let's get these people out of here!"

They struggled through the surging wave of people that was moving into the waiting room, swelling into a bottleneck that threatened to start crushing people unless it was resolved soon. They made it into the waiting room, where the crowd was pressed up against the entrance. Tom couldn't understand why people weren't moving through, then he saw that the sliding doors were closed, and apparently, locked.

"What the…?"

Tom elbowed his way to the front of the crowd, Joe right behind him. It was like trying to swim through quicksand, and Tom could feel the air being squeezed out of his lungs by the crushing mass of the crowd. Just as he had become convinced that he would never get out of it, he found himself pressed against the glass of one of the doors. What he saw on the other side somehow disturbed him more than anything else had done in the past two days.

The soldiers were out there; at least ten of them that Tom could see. They were stood in a rough line facing the door, each one of them carrying a gun.

_What the hell…?_

"Hey!" Tom yelled, hammering on the glass with his fist. "Open the door! What the hell are you doing?"

No reply. The soldiers remained motionless as marble statues, the sun throwing their shadows across the ground. Nonetheless, the doors were mostly made of glass. There was no way they would be able to stand the crushing weight of all these people, more and more of them pressing up against it every second. Tom looked at the doors hinges, and saw they were starting to buckle; any second now, they would break, releasing a wave of human tidal wave. And what would the soldiers do when that happened?

"Get back!" Tom shouted. "Get away from the doors!"

No one heard him. Their faces were filled with dread, and they were desperate to put as many miles between themselves and the hospital as they could.

"Move, move!"

A man came wading through the crowd with a determined glint in his eye, carrying a fire extinguisher in both hands. He planted his feet apart and raised the extinguisher in the air.

"Wait, don't do that!" Tom cried, but once again he went unheard. From where he was, he couldn't move to reach the man, but Joe was already moving through the crowd towards him. He was too late, and the man brought the fire extinguisher down on the door. It shattered instantly, and crumbled into thousands of tiny fragments of glass that spilled across the carpet inside and the asphalt outside. He repeated the procedure on the second door, threw the fire extinguisher down, and was climbing through the shattered hole when a gunshot cracked out and the left side of his head disappeared in a spray of scarlet. He clapped his hands to his head, a look of mortal surprise plastered on what remained of his face, and went down.

The effect on the crowd was galvanic. The doors were swept open, and Tom found himself being buffeted out of the hospital, surfing a wave of sheer panic. He saw the soldiers raise their weapons, flick their safeties off, and take aim.

_No they wouldn't-_

The gunfire rang out, deafening it its sheer intensity. An onslaught of bullets tore through the crowd, and those who fell were immediately trampled underfoot. A slug punched through the throat of a man in front of Tom, and droned just millimeters past his face. Tom dropped to the ground, seeing a body fall dead to the ground in front of him; feeling a shoe kick him in the side hard enough to knock the breath out of his lungs. Knowing it was his only hope for survival, however futile, Tom began to crawl back towards the hospital as shoes stamped across the asphalt all around him, and the bursts of gunfire continued to ring out. He reached the hospital entrance, staggered to his feet, wincing at the burning pain stitched through his side, and clambered inside the waiting room. Outside the gunfire diminished to isolated shots, then to nothing.

Joe was sat against the wall, his gun out. Tom walked over to him, and slid down the wall.

"Shit, I thought you were a goner man." He said. "They didn't hit you did they?"

"No, I'm fine." Tom said, lifting up his shirt and inspecting the blackish-purple bruise that was already forming there. He counted himself lucky that was all he had come away with.

"Why did they do that?" Tom breathed furiously. "Why the hell did those fuckers do that?"

"They must have orders to stop anyone leaving the hospital." Joe said. "The whole building must be under quarantine."

"There are more of them in building." Tom remembered with rising horror.

"Yep," Joe agreed. "And more of those things…the zombies, or whatever."

"Well we need to get the hell out of here." Tom said, rising to his feet.

"Sandra's still in here somewhere." Joe said, standing up beside him. "There's no way in hell I'm leaving without her."

"Shit." Tom said. In the chaos he had completely forgotten that Joe's fiancée was still somewhere in the building. "Do you know where she is?"

"She could be anywhere." Joe admitted. "But she usually works on the fifth floor."

"We'll try there, then." Tom said. It was taking all of his willpower to ignore the small voice in his head that kept insisting if he sat down and closed his eyes, he would wake up and find this was all a dream. They walked out into the hallway, which was abandoned for the moment, and strewn with people's possessions and sheets of paper. From around the corner, in the direction of the elevator, came the sounds of screams and yelling. Light flashed out into the corridor, accompanied by sporadic gunshots. Tom felt his blood run cold as a bullet ricocheted out into the hallway, and punched through a bulletin board less than a foot away from them.

"The elevator's that way." Joe whispered.

"Then we're gonna have to find another way." Tom said quietly. He looked over his shoulder and saw a door marked 'fire exit'. He nudged Joe and the two of them set off slowly towards it, their feet whispering over sheets of paper. From other floors and wings of the hospital came increasing sounds of tumult. Feet stampeded across the floor over their heads, enough to make the lights swing in their fittings, and from somewhere outside came the low thrum of helicopter rotors passing close by.

They reached the fire exit, and Tom nudged it gently open, peering inside. It was empty. He motioned to Joe, and the two of them moved inside. They were in a narrow staircase, surrounded on all sides by windowless cinderblock walls and lit by only one dingy fluorescent light. The staircase on their right moved down into darkness, whilst the one on their left headed upwards, looping around at right angles until it reached the top floor.

Joe moved past him and immediately began bounding up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Tom followed close behind, and nearly ran into him when Joe stopped suddenly on the second level.

"Joe, what are you…?" Tom began, looking over Joe's shoulder. His words faltered when he saw that there was a body lying across their path; a man in doctors whites slumped against the cinderblock. Chunks had been torn from his throat and part of his face, and the floor around him was stained a darkening crimson.

"Is he…?" Tom began.

"Yeah, I think so." Joe said, looking down at the body as if mesmerized. It suddenly struck Tom that he must have been wondering whether his fiancée had suffered the same fate. Tom nudged him and he jumped, as if startled out of a dream.

"C'mon man, let's go." He said.

Joe nodded, and headed up the stairs again, taking an almost comically large stride in order to avoid stepping on the dead man. Tom did the same, but then he turned back to look at the corpse, troubled. He glanced down at the gun in his hand, and then at the dead man, who stared up at the ceiling through eyes that saw nothing.

But they would, in time.

Tom raised the gun to the man's forehead, and closed his eyes. His finger tightened on the trigger.

_BANG._

"Tom!" Joe's voice called down from the flight of stairs above.

"I'm fine." Tom called back. He looked back the dead man, who was lying just the same as he had before, only now with a hole in his head.

"Sorry…" Tom whispered. He turned and ran up the stairs, not looking back. Joe was stood by the door that opened on to the fifth floor.

"What was that?" He asked Tom.

"Nothing." Tom replied. "You ready for this?"

"Yeah, I'm gonna try the staff lounge first, see if she's in there."

"Right." Tom said. "Let's go."

Joe shouldered the door open and they went through into a wide corridor. People were running; Tom caught flashes of panicked, desperate faces; torn clothing; blood. The whole place was in chaos. A man was being devoured on the floor nearby, his struggles slowly fading to isolated twitches. The zombie that had been tearing at this man's arm looked up at them, instantly sensing new prey. It jumped to its feet with a snarl, and Joe sent a bullet through its head. It hit the wall and slid slowly down; a man who had once had the same everyday worries and troubles as everyone else, now somehow reduced to a cannibalistic ghoul.

"Let's go!" Joe said, a note of desperation edging into his voice. He ran down the corridor to the lounge, Tom hot on his heels. The door was standing open and Joe burst through straight away, looking wildly around. Tom followed behind him, glancing around cautiously to make sure nothing followed them in. The staff lounge was empty and deserted. Nobody was there, alive, dead or otherwise.

"Sandra? Sandra?" Joe called in vain. "Where is she?"

Tom strode over to the window, which commanded a view of the entire parking lot. From here, he could see where the soldiers stood guarding the main entrance. The ground stretching from the shattered doors to where they stood was littered with corpses. Tom felt a shiver run up his spine at the realization that he could have very easily ended up amongst them.

"She's not here." Joe said, running his hands through his hair. "Jesus, she could be anywhere. That's if she isn't-"

"We'll find her." Tom said, moving away from the window. "Have you got your cell?"

"No, I left it in the car dammit." Joe said. "C'mon, let's keep looking."

Joe stuck his head out of the door. At one end of the corridor, soldiers were chasing down a group of fleeing patients. The other end of the corridor looked clear.

"Let's go." Joe said. Tom could see in his friend's eyes an urgency that would soon give way to despair, if Sandra wasn't around here somewhere. They moved out into the corridor again, sweeping their glances around them. Joe's eyes came to rest on the nearby nurse's station.

"Oh no…" He whispered, his voice breaking. "Oh fuck, please no…"

Tom brought his gaze to where Joe was looking and felt an icy horror course through his body. Sitting face down in a pool of blood at the nurse's station was the body of a woman in a nurse's uniform. Her long dark hair, which lay plastered in the blood around her head, was identical to Sandra's. The bullet holes in the desk around her indicated she had been shot repeatedly. Walking over to the dead woman, Joe placed his shaking fingers under her chin and lifted her head up gently. She stared back at him with eyes that were as filled with life as those of a stuffed moose. Joe looked down at the ground, letting out a shaking breath and furtively wiping at his eyes.

"Joe?" Tom said, keeping his eyes on the corridor for any signs of zombies or soldiers. "Talk to me, man."

"It's not her," Joe responded. "It's not her."

Tom let out a pent-up breath, his shoulders relaxing. He glanced back from his watch on the corridor to the dead nurse. What was her name? Did she have a family? A husband? Kids, maybe, who would never again have their mom kiss them goodnight, or assure them that the boogeyman in the corner was just a pile of blankets? How had everything been turned upside down on such a colossal scale in the space of a couple of days?

Tom felt his heart begin to flood with a wave of pity and sadness. He steeled himself against it; if they were going to survive, there was no time for this. He turned back to the corridor just in time to see an immense wave of dead flesh burst into view; over fifty zombies stampeding towards him, screaming and howling at the top of their rotting lungs.

"Ohhh fuck." Tom groaned, stepping back. "Joe, we're out of here!"

Joe, who had been rummaging around at the nurse's station for the nurse's shift details, looked up. He saw the oncoming horde, and all color drained from his face. Tom fired two shots into the crowd at random, turned, and tore down the corridor with Joe at his side. Behind them, the footfalls of the undead slapped across the hard floor. Joe peeled off down a corridor to the left, and Tom knew that he was heading back to the stairwell. He ran after him, fire searing through his body where he had been kicked. Chancing a glance over his shoulder, Tom saw that the whole corridor was seething with a boiling river of the undead; over a hundred zombies were after them, running like athletes determined to take home the gold medal, trampling each other in their desperation to taste flesh. Tom felt all hope vanish like a thin wisp of smoke in a high wind.

"Jesus!" Joe yelled aloud, and stopped in his tracks. Tom looked back and saw that the way before them was now blocked, too. Zombies poured from the stairs; men, women, children, doctors, policemen, a decayed mass of humanity with all thought stripped away except one driving sensation; hunger.

Tom and Joe exchanged wild, terrified glances. A thought shot between them borne on a current of wild panic.

_We're fucked._

Tom's eyes roved down to the Glock 35 in his hand. He was going to die here, but he sure as shit wasn't going to be ripped to shreds and eaten alive. Joe looked from Tom's gun to his face, and comprehension dawned in his eyes. Tom looked back, hopelessly. In front and behind, the hordes closed in, one black thought screaming in the empty void of their minds.

_Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill._

_KILL._

A.N. Chapter Six, uh-oh. Please keep the reviews coming, it's great to know people are reading this :)


	7. Operation Carnival

Chapter Seven – Operation Carnival

_Bobby's got a gun that he keeps beneath his pillow, Out on the street your chances are zero, Take a look around you, It ain't too complicated, Your messing with Murder Incorporated. _ -Bruce Springsteen

Oakbrook Park, Chicago._  
_

Oakbrook Park is located in Chicago's Northwest side. The park is open all week, and is overseen by the Chicago Park District, which maintains the plants, trees and wildlife, as well as the large brick Fieldhouse situated in the center of the grounds, home to several basketball teams. On any normal day, you can walk through Oakbrook Park and see people playing baseball and tennis, walking their dogs, or jogging up and down the many paths that snake through the grounds. On the morning of September 23, Oakbrook Park was closed, and if you tried to walk through it, you would have been shot dead.

Colonel Alan Kirkland arrived there a little after 10am, an hour after the park was sealed off. His Blackhawk swooped low over the grounds, and came in to land at the makeshift LZ that had been set up on the park's soccer field. Kirkland jumped from the helicopter when it was still hovering just above the ground, and landed spryly on the grass. He straightened up and looked sternly around; a tall, middle-aged man with short, grey hair and piercing blue eyes. A silver eagle glinted on each shoulder of his neatly pressed fatigues.

Around him, the park was a bustling hive of activity where tents were being set up, floodlights were being raised and wired up to generators, and everywhere soldiers with rifles and machine guns were going about their various errands. Kirkland observed all this with a clear eye, analyzing every detail and running through them in his mind. He supposed that if this was a film, it would have one of those old marching band songs playing in the background; 'Johnny Comes Marching Home' or something like that.

Some of the Apache helicopters were here already, with their Hydra rocket pods and chain guns capable of delivering six-hundred and twenty five rounds per minute. The first attack vehicles were arriving too, Bradley AFV's and Humvees with mounted .50 caliber machine guns. This could end up being the biggest operation since Iraqi Freedom. Kirkland could only hope that it wouldn't last as long, but he knew in his heart that they were going to stick at it as long as it took to get the job done.

But still…

The Colonel looked over his shoulder, where the buildings and skyscrapers of Chicago stood proudly in the distance. This wasn't some pissant Iraqi hamlet or a village in 'Nam, this was Chicago for Christ sakes, a city full of over two million red blooded Americans, with its deep-dish pizzas, its sports teams and its museums, its blues and jazz clubs, and its theatre companies and stadiums. It was a city that embodied America, as a nation and as a people. And now that he was here, he might have to give the order for its destruction. It was enough to send a man crazy.

Sighing, Kirkland turned away from the sight. Behind him, the Blackhawks rotors revved up, filling the air with thunder as it took off again into the crisp September sky. Colonel Kirkland watched it go, before turning and striding across the field in the direction of his tent. As he drew closer he saw that Major Creighton was already standing outside it, closely scrutinizing a clipboard. He glanced up, saw Kirkland approaching, and snapped to attention.

"Colonel Kirkland, sir." He said, firing off a salute.

"At ease, Major," Kirkland said, returning the salute and shaking Creighton's hand. "Are you ready to kick a little undead ass?"

"Always, sir." Creighton said, smiling slightly.

They walked inside Kirkland's tent, which had been set up prior to his arrival. It was sparsely furnished, with Kirkland's desk, a futon, and a couple of cabinets placed flush against the canvas walls. Across from the desk, mounted on the far wall, was an enormous television screen used for video conferencing. Mounted on another wall was Kirkland's framed portrait of General Douglas MacArthur, signed by the Big Chief himself. Kirkland sat himself down in his chair and swung his boots up onto the table.

"So what have you got for me there, soldier?" He asked, gesturing to Creighton's clipboard.

"Word just came back from the lab boys, sir." Creighton said, handing it to him. "The tests that they've ran confirm we're dealing with the regular strain."

"Good, it hasn't mutated then." Kirkland said, flicking his eyes down the clipboard and allowing a small measure of relief to seep through him. One of their main concerns on this operation had been that the virus would mutate, finding some way to spread more easily. The brass in D.C. had been all but shitting green apples over the possibility that this thing could find some way to spread as easily as the common cold or flu, the symptoms of which it impersonated so well. Kirkland couldn't have cared less. If it had mutated they would have just had to shut up and deal with it.

"What about the airspace?" He asked. "Definitely sealed off?"

"Airspace is closed as of 0600 hours this morning, sir." Creighton responded crisply. "Our guys at Scott Air Force Base are flying out F-16 sorties to enforce the no-fly zone. Some of the Apaches are fitted with air-to-air capabilities as well; Stinger missiles and the like. If we need to bulk up the perimeter we can send them out."

"Good." Kirkland said. "We can't afford any slip-ups Major. _Nobody_ gets out of the city."

"No, sir..." Creighton said uncertainly, his usually enthusiastic countenance clouding over. "But uh, with respect sir…"

"Go on, son." Kirkland said gently.

"Well, there are only about five thousand of us in the whole Unit, sir, and there are nearly three million people in the city. And that's not even counting the nine million or so in the greater metropolitan area, sir. Do we have the manpower to conduct an operation on that scale?"

"No, Major." Kirkland said. "We definitely don't. That's why we need to keep it contained. If it spreads too far, we're gonna have to call in some assistance. The Army's 1st and 3rd Infantry Divisions have been placed on standby just in case."

"The Army?" Creighton said, surprised. "The men won't like working alongside those rookies, sir."

"Maybe not," Kirkland admitted. "But they won't let it interfere with the task at hand. And the Army boys'll follow their orders like good little summer soldiers, and let the professionals do their job. At any rate, maybe it won't come to that yet."

Kirkland withdrew a small notepad from the pocket of his ACU jacket. Stamped on the front of it were the words;

DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL OPERATIONS-1ST SPECIAL OPERATIONS UNIT.

Below this, a monochrome eagle surrounded by a circle of fifty stars glared up at him with a sharp eye. Kirkland flipped the notepad open and scanned through the various annotations and scribbles that he had made on the helicopter journey over here; names, mostly. The first on the list was Derek Johnston. An arrow from his name led to Douglas Gaines, M.D. From there, through as yet unknown means, Gaines had infected Shaun Roper, the delivery driver. Roper or his fiancée had somehow infected a man called John Anderson, who had then created the first notable 'incident' with the two cops on Interstate 95. Agents had been sent round to both of their houses, and in the first and possibly only stroke of luck they had had in this operation, confirmed that neither of the two had been infected. Unfortunately Roper had still been at large, and before they could pinpoint his location he had turned a ratty little convenience store into an all-you-can-eat buffet. And now, as the chain of infection grew, the first "riots" had begun in Morgan Park, and any hope of neutralizing the situation quietly and covertly went out the window.

The tent flap opened, and Tech Sergeant Brodsky the Communications Officer entered, a heavy-set, balding man with three thin scars running across his face; a trophy he had received whilst hunting grizzly bears up in Montana.

"How can I help you, Sergeant?" Kirkland asked.

"Sir, the command post has been set up in the Fieldhouse." Brodsky informed him. "Communications are online, and Echo Company are awaiting orders to begin cleanup at the hospital."

"Good." Kirkland said, rising to his feet. "Tell them I'm on my way, Sergeant."

"Yes sir." Sergeant Brodsky saluted and disappeared out the tent flap.

"Major, I need you to go and find Captain Reynolds," Kirkland said, rising to his feet. "He's in charge of body disposal. If this thing spreads, we're not going to have enough fuel to burn all the corpses. We might have to set up a…dumping zone at the lake."

"Yes, sir." Major Creighton said, paling visibly. He turned and vanished after Brodsky. Kirkland reached down and opened the bottom drawer of his desk. Sat on top of a copy of the Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks (Kirkland's favorite book, and a damn sight more helpful than anything the Pentagon had ever produced) was his Beretta M9, loaded with hollow-point bullets. One shot would blow a zombies head wide open. Kirkland checked the safety and placed it in the drop-leg holster on his thigh. From now on he would go nowhere without it. Cracking his knuckles, the Colonel headed outside, where more tents had gone up, and the number of soldiers in the camp had doubled since he had arrived. Some of the M1 Abrams tanks were here too, he saw. The main cannons wouldn't do much against the zombies unless they were packed tightly together, but the M240's could provide suppressing fire, and if things got desperate they could always run the fucking things over.

_God knows,_ Kirkland thought. _It's worked before._

The Fieldhouse loomed up ahead; a graceful brick building dated somewhere around 1930. In more normal times it was host to several sports teams. Now however, it served as the command post for Operation Carnival, the official codename for the containment operation.

_That's another messed up thing about this mission, _Kirkland thought, _its name._

The word carnival conjured up images of parades and marching bands, kids eating cotton candy and sitting on their parent's shoulders to watch the festivities. 'Carnival' was a pretty strange code name for an operation that could potentially end in the death of millions of people. Still, protocol dictated that the operational code name would be automatically generated by computer. 'Carnival', the computer had said, so Carnival they had gone with. And it wouldn't be long now until the festivities began.

Kirkland reached the Fieldhouse and walked inside, saluting to the sentries who were posted at either side of the door. The corridor was teeming with people, technicians and analysts carrying stacks of paper, and hurriedly analyzing the latest figures on charts and PDA's. Striding up the corridor, Kirkland shoved open the double doors and walked into the basketball court, which had been transformed into a fully functional command center within the space of an hour. Computers and TV screens had been put up, displaying live CCTV and satellite images from every inch of the city, connected to bundles of cable that snaked across the floor and looped up the walls. Satellite dishes and modems provided communications that were encrypted a billion ways. Soldiers and technicians were scrambling to answer phones or else standing and issuing orders through headsets, whilst in the bleachers, troops were grimly discussion the situation, or maintaining their weapons and checking their kit.

When Kirkland marched in, all activity ceased, and the stadium stood swiftly to attention.

"Carry on." Kirkland ordered, his voice ringing clearly through the room. The soldiers stood at ease and returned to double-timing about their various errands, throwing an occasional uneasy glance at their commanding officer. They knew that if you pissed the Colonel off, or fucked up somehow, he had the uncanny ability to crush your soul with a glance, rooting you to the spot like an insect being studied under a microscope. Not that fuckups happened very often. Most of the soldiers in the 1st Special Operations Unit were veterans, and had been playing this game for a long time now. This time however, the stakes were higher than ever.

Tech Sergeant Brodsky was there, and he saluted when Kirkland approached.

"Sergeant," Kirkland said, returning the salute. "What's happening at the hospital?"

"Echo Company are on-site." Brodsky informed him. "Captain Langford reports multiple infected on all wards. Her men have sealed off the building and she's posted sentries on all the exits, but she's holding her position to await further orders."

"Patch her through." Kirkland ordered. "And tell Alpha and Charlie Company to get their asses up there and seal off the roads, _triple-time._" He pressed the button on the caller. "Echo-One, this is Citadel, do you read?"

"Echo-One reading you five-by, Citadel." Captain Langford's voice came through clear enough that she could have been stood behind him.

"Explain your situation, Echo."

"We got a hell of a mess here, sir." Giles said. "My men are holding position outside the hospital. Those things are tearing up the place, at least one hundred of them so far, and I've got at least a thousand civilians in there trying to get out."

Kirkland thought for a moment. A hundred zombies was a walk in the park, they had dealt with bigger groups before, no problem. The civilians were the problem. The zombies would spread the infection through the hospital like forest fire. And how did you stop a forest fire? You cut down the goddam trees. Somehow, like always, the civilians had to be removed from the equation.

"Echo-One," Kirkland said deliberately. "You have permission to go in hot. Sweep that whole place clean."

"Copy that, Citadel." Giles confirmed. "Echo Company, going in hot; over and out."

Kirkland turned to Tech Sergeant Brodsky, his face grim.

"I want by-the-minute updates on what's happening over there." He said. "And I want a secure uplink to the White House Situation Room; they'll need to know that we've started the operation."

"It'll be ready in five, sir." Brodsky replied.

"Good." Kirkland swept his gaze over the stadium. Even over the sound of soldiers and technicians coordinating the operation, and phones constantly ringing off the hook, Kirkland could hear the low _whup-whup-whup_ of the helicopters outside, a sound that seemed to emanate through the walls and the floor, as though the entire building was thrumming with anticipation. Kirkland could feel it himself, running through his veins, urging him to hurry up, hurry up, there was no time to lose. Everything that happened from now on, everything in the future of the human race perhaps, rested on what they did in the opening shots of this operation.

Kirkland's thoughts strayed the hospital, to the one thousand men, women and children trapped inside, human beings who he had just condemned to death. But in his heart of hearts, Kirkland new that one thousand people was a small price to pay in order to ensure the safety of his country, and indeed, the safety of the human race. Even three million wouldn't be such a high cost. In the end, numbers didn't matter. All that mattered was getting the job done; everything else was just background noise.

Colonel Kirkland crossed his arms over his chest, and stared thoughtfully at the screens.

_All that matters is getting the job done,_ He thought. _And God help us, that's exactly what we're gonna do. Whatever it takes._

* * *

A.N. - Thanks to SC Girl, PlaneJane 21, ZoruaChanKokoro, Doodlinfool, Shadowelf 144, and anybody else who's taken the time to read or review this story, feedback is greatly appreciated. _  
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	8. The Hospital, Part II

Chapter Eight – The Hospital, Part II

The zombies surged forward. Shredded hands clawed the air; jaws stretched wide revealing sharpened, blood-stained teeth. Tom's eyes darted from side to side, like mice trapped in a rapidly shrinking cage, and then moved down to where the gun was clutched in his hand.

_Now or never, _he thought.

But something still stirred inside him, something that stopped him from putting the gun to his head and pulling the trigger. Whether it was cowardice or some primal survival instinct, Tom had no idea, but it told him that there had to be, that there was _always_ another way out. Tom looked up and there it was.

_Supply closet._

He lunged for the door, seeing his arm move, fingers stretching out to grasp the handle. Time fell into a slow, leisurely pace, like a sludge-filled river moving slowly downstream. Tom's fingers wrapped around the handle, an action that seemed to fill the space of several seconds in this oddly slowed time frame. He pushed down on the handle. If it was locked, fuck it; he was so pumped up he'd be able to go through the damn door.

There was no need for such extreme measures. It wasn't locked.

Tom shoved it open with one hand, and turned around, opening his mouth to bellow at Joe to get inside. But Joe didn't need telling. As Tom turned, Joe swept past him into the supply closet.

"Shut it, shut it!" He cried.

Tom was hauling the door shut behind him, when a mottled grey hand shot through the rapidly closing gap between the door and the jamb, and took a swipe at his face with fingers that were hooked into claws. Tom jerked back and the zombie forced its way further in, squeezing its face in between the gap and bizarrely reminding Tom of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Both its eyes had been clawed out, and it screamed blindly at him through a blood-drenched mouth as Tom forced all his weight against the door. He heard the brittle snap of bones in the creatures arm breaking, but the zombie paid no heed to the injury that would have crippled any normal human being, and continued to try and squeeze way in. That was when Joe strode forward with his SIG Sauer in one hand and his face twisted in revulsion and fury. In one deft movement he put the barrel of the gun to the creature's temple and fired. The blast sounded as loud as an ammunition dump going up in the closed confines of the supply closet, and Tom momentarily stumbled back, his ears filled with a skull-rending ringing like a drill going into his brain.

The zombie was worse off however, and with a hole in the middle of its forehead it fell back, its arm swiping limply at the air before disappearing through the gap. Tom and Joe threw their collective weight against the door and braced themselves against it, just as the rest of the party arrived, and began hammering on the other side. For one horrible moment, Tom thought the door would fly open, sending both him and Joe flying against the far wall and letting in a crushing mass of zombies.

The door held, but with that many of the bastards throwing themselves against it, Tom knew that they wouldn't have long.

"Right…" Joe said. "What the fuck do we do now?"

Tom turned so his back was against the door, and surveyed the room, looking for anything at all that might help them get out of this mess. It was an average hospital supply closet, used to hold medical equipment and cleaning supplies, nothing more, nothing less. Tom didn't think that hypodermic needles and gauze were going to be much use against the slavering hordes trying to force their way inside. There were no other doors or windows in the place either; they were trapped.

_It wasn't a way out, _Tom thought despairingly, _just a slower death._

"Fuckin' way to go, huh?" Joe remarked, grunting with the effort of holding the door shut. "You wake up every morning wondering if today's the day you catch a bullet or get stabbed by some strung-out junkie. But no, today's the day you get your ass chewed off by a horde of zombies. That one I was _not_ looking out for."

Tom grinned in spite of himself, then winced as a particularly heavy blow on the other side of the door sent them skidding inches forward on their heels. A flabby arm with yellowed, broken nails came squirming through the gap and scratched across the front of Tom's uniform. Tom grimaced and grabbed the arm with both hands, pulling it through the gap whilst slamming the door against it with his elbow. Bones crunched loudly, and the arm fell limp like a dead snake, before slithering back out.

"I think we're out of options, Joe." Tom said, panting with exertion.

Joe didn't answer immediately. His eyes had fixed on something on the wall across from them, near to the ceiling. It was a large rectangular hole set in the surface of the wall, covered by a metal grate; an air duct, part of the hospitals ventilation system. Tom guessed it would be just big enough for a man of average size to squeeze through.

"You see that?" Joe asked.

"Yeah," Tom said, grimacing as the door was pounded on hard enough to make it literally bulge in its frame. "Go check it out, man."

"Are you sure?" Joe asked him. "Can you hold the door on your own?"

"Yeah," Tom gasped, ignoring the screams in his muscles, which felt like they were about to spontaneously combust. "Hurry up, feels like this whole fucking wall's gonna come down."

Joe pushed himself away from the door, and went over to the air duct, wiping away the dust and dirt that had gathered around it.

"Well?" Tom asked impatiently. The door was thudding and banging as fists rained down on it. The screams of bloodlust and insanity were deafening.

"It's stuck on pretty good." Joe noted, trying to get a grip around the edges of the vent. "I think if I can just-"

There was a crack as one of the hinges broke, and a shudder ran through the door. It was about to go.

"Ah, fuck." Tom groaned. He glanced down at the ground and saw a spreading pool of blood seeping under the door. The zombies were hammering themselves to shit, trying to get in. "Joe, hurry the fuck up, man!"

"I'm – trying!" Joe said, his face screwed up in concentration. "Fucking thing doesn't want to fucking-"

There was a squeaking, grating noise, and the vent cover slid off, and clanged loudly on the floor. It might have just been his imagination, but Tom thought the desperate beats on the other side of the door trebled in ferocity, as though the zombies somehow knew that their food had a chance of escaping. Joe grabbed on to the edges of the air duct and peered inside.

"What do you see?" Tom asked.

"It kinda stretches away, and then turns off to the right." Joe replied, turning back to him. "I don't know where it ends up, but I think it's our only chance, man."

"We'll take it." Tom said. "Go-hurry!"

Joe grabbed onto the edges, and hauled himself into the air duct, his feet kicking around in the air as they slowly disappeared inside. Tom looked at the duct with growing dread. Once he let go of the door, would he even have time to disappear inside it before those things got inside? And the crucial question, would the zombies be able to follow?

The puddle of blood was growing, pooling around his shoes in a crimson tide. Tom grimaced, and launched himself away from the door with all the strength he could muster, closing the space between himself and the air duct in two bounding leaps, and latching onto the edge of the hole with both hands. The closet door swelled in its frame, its metal handle jouncing crazily up and down. Tom, his mind empty apart from one single, screaming imperative (_escape!_), scrambled up into the air duct just as the last hinge popped, and the door, like a man shot dead falling flat on his face, fell forward.

The zombies were inside instantly. The vanguard of the horde were crushed and trampled by their fellow flesh-eaters, who were in turn, crushed and trampled by those behind them. Tom twisted around in the air duct, scrambling to get his legs inside as fast as possible. A man in blood soaked scrubs and a surgical mask stepped out of the fray and leapt across the room, grabbing Tom's ankle with one cold hand.

_Of course it's cold, he's fucking dead._

Tom kicked his foot out, hitting nothing but thin air but loosening the zombies grip on his leg. He kicked again and felt a second hand wrap around his leg, just above the first. A second later, Tom felt teeth scraping against his leg as the zombie tried in vain to bite him through the surgical mask. It hissed like a coiled snake, apparently furious at its inexplicable inability to bite him. Tom fumbled for his gun and fired blindly, the bullet clanging off the sides of the metal duct, sending a shower of sparks in front of his face.

"_Fuck, fuck, fuck!"_ Tom hissed. He leaned back with his gun clasped in both hands, and fired twice. This time, the shot couldn't have been more accurate if the zombie had had a giant bullseye painted on its forehead. It went down with two smoking holes between its eyes, allowing Tom to pull himself further inside the air duct.

"You okay, man?" Joe called from somewhere behind him.

"Yeah," Tom replied, listening to the screams of the undead coming through the air vent. To Tom's ears, they sounded even more wild and bloodthirsty than usual. The rotting bastards had been cheated out of their meal, and they were furious about it. The thought sent a cold shudder through him, and suddenly claustrophobia was squeezing him with clammy, suffocating fingers. Tom rolled over onto his elbows, breathing heavily. Joe was sat with his back against the wall. Ahead of them, there was a T-intersection where the air duct branched off in opposite directions.

"Did he…bite you?" Joe asked.

"No." Tom said, checking his leg. It was a procedure he was now getting used to carrying out. There was no sign of blood, and the skin hadn't been broken; there was only a faint ghost of bite marks on his calf. Tom rolled his trouser leg back down. "So what do we do now?"

"Well, I don't have a fucking clue where we are." Joe looked left and right, where the air duct stretched away into the further reaches of the hospital. Faint cries and yells echoed through the network of pipes and tunnels; whether coming from humans or the undead, neither of them could tell. "We should try and find a way out of here through another vent; there's gotta be one that leads outside the building."

"Yeah, but which way; left or right?"

Joe glanced seriously left and right, his eyes shrewd. "_Eenie meenie miney moe…"_ He whispered.

"Oh for Christ's sake…" Tom muttered. He had had his life saved by a half-empty MP5, a supply closet, an air duct, a surgical mask, and now major decisions that would decide whether the two of them lived or died were being made via eenie meenie miney fucking moe. It was shaping up to be a hell of a day. Joe finished with his finger pointing down the left duct.

"This way I guess." He said.

"Okay, be careful." Tom warned. "I don't think those things are smart enough to use the ducts, but we can't rule out the possibility that one's crawled in here by accident."

"Or that somebody's been infected, hidden in a duct and then died." Joe pointed out.

"Exactly," Tom said. "Let's go."

They started to make their way through the air duct, turning left twice more, crawling on their elbows, and knees, keeping their ears tuned for the slightest noise.

_All we need now is a fucking drill sergeant screaming orders at us,_ Tom thought. There were vents set beneath them at regular intervals, and through them he could look down and see the corridor passing below them. The undead were still choking the place, most of them concentrated around the supply closet. Tom couldn't see inside from this angle, but he guessed that they were still clawing at the air vent he and Joe had escaped through. Maybe they could still smell them; he could only pray that they couldn't follow them.

The duct continued on, twisting and turning until Tom lost all sense of orientation. They were still somewhere on the fourth floor, but where, he had no idea. Tom glanced down through a passing vent and caught glances of blood-splashed hallways and body-strewn wards. He looked away quickly, his stomach doing back flips. Joe had stopped, his head cocked to one side.

"What is it?" Tom whispered.

"I can hear voices." Joe whispered back.

Tom looked over his shoulder, listening. He could hear them too, low murmurs and hushed whispers. Whoever was talking clearly didn't want to be overhead. Tom turned back to Joe.

"Do you think-"

But Joe was gone.

* * *

A.N. - Sorry if this chapter's a little shorter than usual, but I'm going away for two weeks tomorrow and I wanted to get something uploaded before I left. Anyway, please read and let me know what you think :)


	9. The Hospital, Concluded

A.N. – First off, I'd like to apologize. I've been taking time to try and get the characters right, so this update has been a _long_ time coming. Anyway, here's chapter nine, please read and let me know what you think.

* * *

Chapter Nine – The Hospital, Concluded.

"Jesus!" somebody cried.

There was a heavy thud and a grunt of pain, followed by the sound of objects clattering to the floor. Tom drew his gun and crawled over to where his friend had disappeared through the hole. Cautiously, he poked his head over. An air vent had unhinged beneath Joe's hands and knees, spilling him into the room below, where he now lay on the floor, looking dazed and disorientated. A pale-faced man who looked to be in his early 40's was stood over him, uncertainly pointing an assault rifle at Joe's head.

"Is he one of them?" asked a wide-eyed man in a doctor's coat, his back pressed against the wall.

"Dunno." The man with the rifle said. Dark patches of sweat were spreading on his shirt and tie, and it was trickling down his face in rivulets. "Better not risk it." He raised the gun.

"But look at the uniform; he's a cop." The doctor said uncertainly.

"I saw a cop rip a kid's throat out twenty minutes ago." The man stated bluntly. "I'm not taking any goddam chances."

"_Wait."_ A female voice commanded sternly. From his vantage point, Tom saw a woman in nurse's scrubs rise to her feet. Tom immediately recognized Joe's long-time girlfriend, and now more recently fiancée, Sandra.

"Joe?" She asked, her voice thick with disbelief.

"Sandra," Joe said, his eyes widening. "My God it's really you." They wrapped their arms around each other and kissed, whilst the sweating man stood like a statue, his rifle still pointing at Joe's head. Joe broke the kiss and cocked an eyebrow at the man.

"Buddy, either put that thing away or use it." He said flatly.

"Maybe I will," The man said, his trigger finger twitching. "Maybe I just will."

"I wouldn't if I were you." Tom said from the ceiling. Eyes shot up to where he was leaning out of the air duct, his Glock 35 in one hand. "We're all on the same side here, so take it easy, okay?"

The man's eyes narrowed, flicking from the gun, to Tom's face and back again.

"Mister," An old guy by the door said quietly. "I think you had better listen to the officer here."

"Fine," The man spat finally, lowering the rifle. "Just…just don't try anything."

Tom dangled his legs out of the air duct and slid himself out, staggering slightly as he landed on the floor. It had been a higher drop than he'd thought, and he'd forgotten about the bruise on his side from where someone's foot had connected below his left arm, which now sent a faint spasm of pain through him. At least it didn't feel like he'd broken any ribs, and God knew, he could have come away with a hell of a lot worse; a bullet through his brain for one. Tom straightened up and looked around at the room and its occupants. It was, of all the places they could have landed, another fucking supply closet, but at least the door wasn't rocking with the frantic hammer-blows of the undead. An old man, bald apart from two tufts of white hair above his ears was standing by the door, gripping a crowbar in one knotted hand. He looked concerned but calm and capable enough, given the situation. Standing beside him was a middle-aged man in a white doctor's coat. Stenciled above the left breast pocket was the man's name; Michael Allen M.D.

Looking at Dr. Allen, a vivid flashback suddenly rose out of Tom's memory. It had been sixteen years ago, when Tom had just turned eighteen, and had his parents had bought him a new car for his birthday. Tom had been taking it for a test drive out on U.S. 41 when a deer had bounded out of the foliage at the side of the road, and stood there, frozen in the glare of the vehicles high-beams. Tom had swerved the wheel and the car screamed across the two lanes, avoiding the deer by what might have been inches, but the damn thing had just stood there, its eyes bright and terror-blind. The doctor looked a lot like that now; as though he were a defenseless animal about to be mown down by a charging predator, all winking chrome and choking exhaust fumes.

Standing morosely at the opposite end of the supply closet was the trigger-happy man with his rifle, his oily hair shining under the lights. He arms were followed over his chest and he was flicking his eyes around the room with sullen suspicion. His gun, a military issue M4 carbine, was slung over his shoulder. He looked more than ready to unsling it and start blasting away at a seconds notice.

Beside him, huddled in the corner, were a man and a woman who looked to be a couple. The woman was crying, and the man was doing his best to comfort her, whispering that they were safe now, that the cops were here, everything would be alright. They were empty promises, and the woman looked like she knew it. The guy clearly knew it as well, but Tom respected him for trying.

"So what the fucking hell do we do now?" Rifle Man spat impatiently. "Are you here to rescue us or screw about doing nothing?"

"In case you didn't notice buddy, we just fell out of the goddam ceiling." Tom said. "We're in the same position as you."

"Oh right, _fantastic."_ Rifle Man threw his arms up in exasperation. "So we just sit here and wait for those things to break down the door?"

"_What are those things?_" the woman asked, turning her tear-streaked face up to them. "_What in the name of God is going on here?"_

Tom wanted to respond, but words escaped him. Where the hell was he supposed to start? I'm sorry to break this to you, lady, but the dead are returning to life and attacking the living?

"Ma'am," He began carefully. "It's like…"

"They're dead." A voice said hoarsely. It was Dr. Allen, still standing motionless against the wall like a prisoner of war facing a firing-squad. "They're dead, but they can still…they can still…"

"What do you fucking mean they're dead?" Rifle Man hissed. His M4 carbine had dropped from his shoulder into his hands, and he looked angry and desperate enough to pull the trigger if he didn't get some answers soon. "Start talking straight doc, or I swear to God…"

"They died." Dr. Allen said, an edge of hysteria creeping into his voice. "Every single man, woman and child who had been bitten, they _all_ died. _Not a single one survived! At first I thought it was a flu epidemic or something, but every single person displaying symptoms had been bitten! And just as we realized the correlation, people started dying left right and center!_" He looked up at them all then, his eyes latching on to every person in the room. The deer-in-headlights look was gone, and now his eyes were filled with desperation. "_I did everything I could, I swear, but more patients just kept coming; car loads of them! And some of the injuries – Jesus Christ!"_

"Will somebody shut him up before he attracts every freak in the building?" Rifle Man asked.

"I'm sure you did everything you could, Doc." The old guy said gently, putting a hand on Allen's shoulder. "You say it was the bites that killed people, right? What is it, some kind of infection? Do these people have…I don't know, rabies or something?"

"It's not rabies." Dr. Allen whimpered. "It starts off like the common cold, or flu. The patient steadily worsens, develops a fever, swelling of the lymph nodes. Eventually the patient dies of respiratory failure, they literally choke to death on their own mucus, or else the fever burns them down. Then they…then they…"

"_Then they what?_" barked Rifle Man.

"They come back." Dr. Allen said flatly. "They come back as those…_things. _Then they attack everyone else they see, con-consuming the victim and spreading the infection."

"So you're saying…" said the man in the corner with his arm around his wife. "Those people running around out there are…_dead._"

Dr. Allen nodded. He appeared to be getting a grip on himself now, maybe explaining the situation in medical terms had put him on familiar ground. "Yes. In that all bodily functions and vital signs have ceased, they're technically dead."

Silence. Tom glanced around the room, gauging people's reactions, trying to read their faces. The emotions he saw varied from disbelief, to uncertainty, to fear.

"Fucking. Bullshit." Rifle Man spat. "Have you gone fucking crazy? I mean what is this shit?"

"It does seem awfully far-fetched, Doc…" The old guy said uneasily.

"I'm afraid it's true, sir." Tom spoke up. "I've seen it with my own eyes. These people have been popping up all over the city. Maybe the whole country, I don't know. You can shoot them in the chest, or the arms or legs, and they keep running at you like they didn't even feel it. You shoot them in the head-" Tom made a gun with his thumb and forefinger and put it to his temple. "-they go down. Otherwise, they'll just keep coming until they catch you."

"And then?"

"They eat you."

"Bullshit." Rifle Man repeated, his mouth set in a thin, determined line that said 'I don't believe this and you can't make me'. "These people are fucked up on drugs or something. The amount of junkies in this city, shit like this was bound to happen one day."

As Dr. Allen listed all the reasons why that couldn't be, Tom turned away from the discussion and headed for the door, which had been braced with a stepladder and several mops and brushes propped under the handle. He didn't think that would do much good if the zombies attacked, remembering the way the door in the other supply closet had popped off its hinges as the undead piled against it.

Tom leaned against the door and pressed his ear against the surface, listening intently.

Nothing. Whether that was because the door was too thick to hear through, or because there was nothing happening out there, Tom had no idea. There was only one way to find out. As he turned away from the door, a splash of red in his peripheral vision caught Tom's attention.

"What the hell?" He asked. "How did he get there?"

Dr. Allen glanced into the corner of the room Tom was currently gazing at.

"He was already there when we came in. I-I checked for a pulse, but…I figure he's been dead for about fifteen minutes, judging by body temperature and the time all this craziness started."

"I took his gun," Rifle Man said, patting his M4. "I figured he wouldn't mind."

Slumped in a shadowy corner of the room was the dead body of a soldier, his legs splayed stiffly out in front of him, his helmet lying on the floor beside him. He could have been asleep were it not for the gaudy splash of blood and bone sprayed across the wall beside his head. Clasped in one of his stiffening hands was a semiautomatic 9mm handgun, standard military issue sidearm. Moving quickly, not giving his mind any time to dwell on what he was doing, Tom seized the dead man's fingers and pried them away from the handgun, whilst using his other hand to pick the weapon up. He slid the magazine out. Brass gleamed dully up at him, every bullet accounted for except the one that the soldier had shot through his own brain. But why?

An idea struck Tom, and he reached out and lifted the man's chin up, exposing his neck. The flesh on the throat and neck was unmarked, and the man's gas mask was still securely in place. Tom let the head fall back, and picked up one of the man's hands. Just below the knuckle of his index finger was a large bite mark, stretching from the knuckle to the base of the thumb. The flesh had been torn jaggedly, and dark blood still covered the wound.

Tom saw everything clearly now. This guy had been bitten, not too badly, but as Tom was learning, a bite was a bite. He had come in here, sat down and blown his brains out.

Which meant he had known exactly what was going to happen.

And that meant-

A sudden explosion startled Tom out of his thoughts. It echoed from somewhere above them, perhaps from as high as the roof, and resonated down through the building, making the walls around them tremble as it faded away into nothing. There was still a battle going on out there, and no matter how safe they might have thought they were in here, their refuge was just a tiny ship stuck in the throes of a colossal storm, destined to be smashed to pieces any second now.

It was time to go.

"What was that?" Rifle Man asked, looking at the tiny flakes of plaster drifting down from the ceiling.

"Sounded like a grenade or something." Joe suggested.

"No, it was bigger." The old guy stated. "It sounded like…_artillery._ But that's insane; they wouldn't-"

"They would." Tom said, recalling the frantic stampede out of the shattered doors, and the subsequent hail of bullets that had greeted it. "We need to get out of here."

"You mean go out there?" Rifle Man asked incredulously. "Are you out of your goddam mind?"

"It's our only chance. If we stay in here, we'll all die eventually."

"It's a madhouse out there, son." The old guy said. "I'm not sure how much you saw of what's going on out there, but-"

"I saw it all sir. Trust me I did." Tom assured him. "I know it's going to be tough, but if we want to have a hope of surviving, we have to leave _now_."

"Fuck that." Rifle Man said stubbornly. "You can't make me do anything."

"I'm not _making_ you do anything." Tom said impatiently. They were fast running out of time. "Anybody who wants to stay here can. If those of us who want to get out _do_ get out, we'll send help back."

Silence. Joe looked at Sandra questioningly. She nodded at him, biting her lip anxiously.

"We're with you." She said, speaking for both of them.

"We'll come too." Said the woman in the corner, drying her eyes as her husband sat with an arm protectively around her. "I don't want to die; not in this place."

"Sure; but tell me this, officer," The husband said, 'and please don't bullshit me', the look in his eyes added. "Do you really think we can get out of here?"

"If we stick together, and move quickly, we might have a chance." Tom said. "I'm sorry but I can't give you anymore guarantee than that."

"I'm with you, son." The old man said. He stuck his hand out. "Name's George; George Evans. Figure if we might die together, we may as well get acquainted."

"Tom Everett," He replied. "We'll get out of here sir, I promise."

"Well isn't this just great." Rifle Man said. "I'm glad we had the chance to do the whole meet n' greet before we go out and die."

"You gave me the impression you wanted to stay here, sir." Tom remarked.

"On my own?" Rifle Man asked. "Fuck that shit – I'm with you guys. As long as you understand that at the first sign of trouble I'm hauling my ass out of there."

"That's very commendable of you, Mr.—"

"Ben Kimball. Don't bother remembering it, because once we're out of here, we're never gonna see each other again."

"Sounds good." Tom gestured to the rifle. "You sure you know how to fire that thing?"

"Point and shoot," Ben Kimball said, shrugging. "What else is there to it?"

Tom looked around; Joe had his P226, Kimball had his M4, and he himself had his Glock 35. He held the soldier's M9 up in the air. "Does anyone think they know how to shoot this?"

George Evans shook his head, and Dr. Allen looked at the pistol as though it were a coiled snake that might leap out of Tom's hand and attack at any second. The man with the arm around his wife looked around awkwardly, before rising to his feet and clearing his throat.

"Uh, I think I can, officer." The guy said. "I target shoot sometimes – pistols and the like. I'm no Annie Oakley, but…"

"Great," Tom said, handing the gun to him. He felt uneasy; handing guns out to civilians broke pretty much every rule in the book. Then again, escaping from a zombie-infested hospital wasn't a situation that was covered by the rulebook. "If you have to use it, be careful, it's a semi auto and I don't have any more magazines."

The guy nodded, taking the gun. He popped the clip and checked it, before slotting it back in and sliding the gun in his belt, safety firmly on. He didn't look like a professional by any means, but at least he had an idea of what he was doing, and that put Tom's mind at ease.

"One more thing; if you need to shoot, be careful what you're shooting at. Those things can look a hell of a lot like normal people if they're not too messed up."

"I will," the guy said. "Thanks for getting us out of here, officer. Before you came, I thought we were going to be stuck in here until we all…" He looked uneasily at his wife. "Well thanks anyway; name's Don Jackson, this is my wife Christine."

"Tom Everett." Tom replied, shaking Donald Jackson's hand, then his wife's. Christine Jackson had acquired a dazed, absent look, her face that of a sleepwalker. Tom had seen that face plenty of times, mostly on people he had arrested. It was the face of someone who is unable to comprehend exactly what's happening. Maybe none of them could fully comprehend what was happening. Tom felt that if he did, he'd probably go nuts.

* * *

A few minutes later, the supply closet door snicked open an inch. Tom squinted through the gap, ready to pull the door shut again at a seconds notice. Through the crack he could see what looked like a discarded shoe, a piece of paper, and not a lot else. Cautiously, his heart beating so fast he could hardly breath, Tom edged the door further open. No zombies came flying at him, no bullets whizzed through the air. There was silence except for the bass line of Tom's heartbeat thumping in his ears, a sound that seemed loud enough to draw every creature in the hospital towards him. Yet none came.

_Maybe they're all dead, _He thought, allowing himself a fraction of fool's hope. _Maybe they all killed each other._

A voice called out from upstairs, answered immediately by two swift gunshots. There was a pause, and the voice cried out again before falling silent. Tom put his foot against the door and slowly opened it all the way, sweeping his pistol across his field of view. He wished, not for the first or last time that day, for the comforting weight of the Remington shotgun in his hands. Unfortunately the shotgun was in the cruiser, so Tom knew he would just have to make do. The door completed its slow arc and came to rest against the wall. Tom stepped out into the corridor, sweeping his pistol in every direction, searching for the slightest movement that might signal the approach of an enemy.

Nothing.

Tom let out a pent up breath, and that was when the nurse came flying out at him from an adjacent room, her face a torn death-mask, murder in her eyes. Tom fired off two quick shots, what was known in the trade as a 'double-tap'. The nurse's head snapped backward, momentum carrying her forward a further foot or so before she collapsed at Tom's feet.

_Fuck it,_ Tom thought angrily._ Never let your goddam guard down, you know better than that._

He motioned to the others, and one by one they stepped out of the closet. Joe first, closely followed by Sandra, Dr. Allen, Christine and Donald Jackson, George Evans, and finally Ben Kimball bringing up the rear.

"Which way do we go now?" Joe asked Dr. Allen, who had the look of a mouse emerging from its hole and knowing full well that there was a very large cat around.

"This way," Allen said, pointing up the corridor. "It branches off left and right. The elevator's at the end of the left corridor, and the fire stairs are just next to it, I think."

"You'd better be right, Doc." Ben Kimball said.

"I-I am sure." Allen affirmed uncertainly. "It's not too far."

"Okay, let's go." Tom said.

"Right behind you man." Joe said.

They started up the corridor in single-file, stepping over anything that might make a sound and attract undue attention. Tom kept his eyes straight ahead, while the others looked into the patients rooms that spanned the corridor, making sure nothing would leap out and catch them unawares. There could be no doubt that the patient's rooms were where most of this shit had gone down. Beds were destroyed, chairs and tables smashed, the walls covered with insane calligraphies daubed in blood. In more than one room, windows were smashed, the jagged frames of glass glinting in the sun. Tom was reminded of the images from September 11, the men and women who, in mad desperation, had flung themselves from windows to escape the flames.

At the rear of the column, Ben Kimball walked backwards, eyes firmly on the receding corridor. His M4 carbine was at chest level, ready to shoot at a seconds notice. He would have no qualms about cutting and running if he had to. Hopefully the crazies would be distracted tearing apart the others, giving him a chance to slip away.

Ben Kimball had decided that he wasn't going to die in this place. It was really as simple as that.

They reached the T-intersection, where the corridor branched off left and right. To the right, the empty hall stretched away, devoid of anything except corpses. A thin, almost emaciated figure stalked out from one of the rooms, raised its head and appeared to sniff at the air. Tom trained the Glock's sights on it, ready to fire if necessary. The creature lowered its head, appearing to catch the scent of prey, before turning and dashing up the corridor, its speed amazing for something that was supposedly dead. It turned the corridor and vanished, allowing Tom to let out a breath he hadn't even been aware he was holding. A choked scream echoed up the corridor, cut off with sudden finality. The prey had been caught; the kill made.

"Unlucky son of a bitch." Joe whispered.

"Whatever," Ben Kimball hissed from the back. "Can we get the fuck outta here? This place is giving me the creeps."

Ben Kimball was one of those people who possessed a rare talent to make themselves disliked almost immediately, whether it was because they were angry, frightened or just didn't like other people. Whatever the reason, Tom had to admit that the guy was right. A chill was running down his spine, as though a corpse was running skeletal fingers down the nape of his neck. Everything about the hospital was freaking him out, from the infected yellow sunlight spilling through the windows, falling on corpses and shards of broken glass, to the eerie silence that seemed to have fallen over every room and corridor like a shroud. Only an hour ago this place had been an efficiently running, well maintained city hospital.

Now, it was a tomb; one where the dead were restless.

Tom turned his gaze to the corridor leading left, his eyes again searching for the slightest movement.

"It's this way, right Doctor?"

"Yes, I believe so." Dr. Allen said faintly. His eyes were rooted on the corpse of a teenage boy nearby. A small-caliber bullet had been placed between the kid's eyes with deadly accuracy.

"He's right." Sandra confirmed firmly. "They're at the end of the hall."

Tom stepped gingerly around the kid's body and they treaded down the hall, keeping their footsteps as quiet as possible, watching out for broken glass and patches of blood. Outside, Tom heard the low _whup whup whup _of rotors as a helicopter passed close by. He could imagine the pilots sat in their cabin, scanning the ground with thermal imaging and infra-red and fuck knew what else, ready to wipe out anyone trying to escape.

The sound of the chopper died away, and the silence returned, like a shroud settling over a corpse. Tom came to a sudden stop halfway down the corridor. Behind him, the others did the same.

"What is it, Tom?" Joe asked. "You see something?"

"No." Tom replied. "But can you hear that?"

Joe listened closely, trying to detect any break in the unnatural silence. Then he heard it. From down the hall came the sound of ripping cloth. There was a moment's silence, and then the sound came again; not cloth ripping this time, but something else being torn into.

"Sounds like more of them," Joe whispered. "C'mon, we can take them."

"_Be careful._" Sandra mouthed.

Joe nodded, smiling slightly, and went over to Tom who was stood with his back to the wall. Don Jackson hovered uncertainly, torn between helping them out and protecting his wife. Tom meanwhile, moved down the rest of the corridor with his back to the wall, coming to a stop when he reached the corner. He checked the Glock's magazine, and was greeted by the gleam of five brass casings. Popping the clip back in, he leaned round the corner, stopping so that just his nose and left eye would be visible to anyone at the other side.

"What do you see?" Joe asked.

"Four of them," Tom replied. "They're uh…eating someone. Three of them are facing away from us, and I think the other one's looking to the elevators. They look pretty busy; I think we can get the drop on them."

"Then let's do it."

Tom brought the Glock up so its barrel was pointing at the ceiling. He nodded to Joe and span round the corner, centering his sights on the first target. He fired, and the bullet plowed through the first zombie's head. It collapsed forward over the body it had been feeding on. But its comrades weren't dumb. The moment their fellow zombie had his head blown off, they lurched to their rotted feet with agility they had no business possessing. Joe opened up on them with three well-spaced shots from his pistol. The first punched through a zombie's exposed shoulder, while the second impacted the creature's skull at lethal velocity, redecorating the far wall with a gaudy splash of red. The third bullet went wild, blowing out a nearby plate-glass window and showering the ground four stories below with chips of glass.

The third zombie, a man who appeared to be missing his lower jaw and left eye, lunged for Tom. The cop dived out of the way, throwing himself against one of the elevators. The zombie got a handful of thin air. It snapped its neck around, its face cheated and furious, and Tom sent a bullet through one remaining eye, the dusty orb imploding a second before the back of the zombie's head blew out.

The last zombie lunged for Joe, who dodged out the way and sent it flying with a kick to the side of the head, losing his balance and falling over in the process. The zombie sprawled on the ground like a drunk being knocked out in a bar fight, before clambering back to its feet. This time, the focus of its attention was on Dr. Allen, who shrank back against the wall, his eyes wide, mouthing unintelligible words. The zombie opened its jaws, revealing a mouthful of shattered teeth, and dived in for the kill. A metal crowbar swung through the air and impacted the side of its head moments before it would have made Dr. Michael Allen, M.D. a new member of the rapidly growing undead club. George Evans stood there, panting heavily, his face torn between fury and fear.

The creature staggered back, blood cascading down the side of its ruined face. It turned around, determined to satisfy its hunger, and a bullet shot through its head, leaving a spray of red mist in its wake. It fell forward, whatever force that had controlled it destroyed by a bullet to the brain. Now it was just a corpse.

"Oh, _shit._" Don Jackson said, looking at the smoking pistol in his hand. "_Oh shit, shit, shit._" His wife buried her head in his shoulder, and he embraced her fiercely, as if the rapid disintegration of their world would tear them apart.

"Everyone okay?" Tom asked. "No one's been bitten? Dr. Allen? George?"

Dr. Allen shook his head in negation, his whole body trembling.

"I'm fine, son." George said shakily. "Shall we get out of here?"

Tom thumbed the button beside the elevator, already knowing it was useless. The button wasn't illuminated, and the arrows above the sliding doors were dark. No sound of whirring winches and cables came from behind the sliding steel doors. Tom tried the next one, receiving the same result. Even though the power was still on, the elevators had either been damaged or shut down.

"Oh this is just fucking great, what do we do now?" Ben Kimball snarled.

"Shut up and let me think." Tom replied. "Mr. Evans, can I borrow that crowbar?"

George handed it the bloodied crowbar to him, and Tom pried it between the two doors, pushing them apart enough so that he could use his foot to force one of the doors back all the way, revealing the empty elevator shaft. Above and below it stretched away into darkness. A cold breath of air whispered from the void.

"Right, looks like we're taking the stairs." Tom said. "It's only four stories, we should be fine."

"_We'd be fine if it wasn't for the_ _mass murderer convention going on."_ Kimball hissed.

"Quiet son," George Evans said sternly. "That kind of talk isn't helping anybody."

Tom headed for the fire door, glancing through the wire mesh window at the empty stairwell beyond. It was peppered with bullet holes and littered with empty shell casings, but for the moment it looked clear. Tom tried the door, and found it locked.

"Ah, fuck what do we do now?" Ben Kimball said exasperatedly shaking his head.

Tom's reply was to raise his pistol and shoot the lock twice, emitting a shower of sparks, before kicking the door open with his foot, and letting it swing into the empty stairwell beyond.

"Let's go." He said.

They went down in single-file, Tom at the front, with Joe just behind him and Ben Kimball covering the rear again. Tom was doing his best not to let eagerness cloud his judgment. They were nearly out, perhaps halfway there, but they had already had two close calls. Who was to say the next one wouldn't be fatal?

Tom heard the unmistakable crash of the fire doors above them being flung open, followed by the rumbling thunder of boots on the stairs and the clamor of men shouting hurried orders. An explosion rattled the frame of the building, and Tom had to grip the railing to stop himself from falling down the last four steps.

"What in holy fuck was that?" Ben Kimball cried.

"I think that was our cue to get outta here." Tom said. The thump of boots was getting closer. "_Now._"

He jumped down the last steps and grabbed the handle of the fire door. In this case, the wire mesh window was splattered with some red and gray substance, blocking any view of the hallway beyond. Tom pushed down on the handle and shouldered the door open, grunting with the strain. Someone had placed a stretcher behind the door in a desperate attempt to barricade it, and as Tom pushed the door open it toppled over with a clang.

_Dammit,_ Tom thought. _If that doesn't attract every zombie in the building nothing will._

He stepped out into the corridor, covering the north end with his gun whilst Joe covered the south. Another huge explosion rang out overhead, as though God was stepping on the building with one titanic foot, trying to stamp out the abomination that had overtaken it. The image of a colossal bearded figure in a white robe stomping furiously on a Chicago hospital was one Tom had never expected to conjure up.

In the stairwell, footfalls stamped and echoed, getting closer every second.

"Come on." Tom said, motioning for the others to follow him. They started down the corridor that Tom hoped would lead them to freedom. Freedom from this fucked up location where the basic rules of life and death no longer seemed to apply. And what would they find outside? A city in the same condition? An entire country ready to devour itself?

There was no time to think about that. For now, he had to concentrate on what was before his eyes.

A sign loomed ahead, hanging from the ceiling. White, clinical lettering directed them to the ambulance entrance. One more turn left and they would be home free.

That was when Ben Kimball called; "Problem!"

Tom span round, already aiming his gun down the corridor. Some dozen or so zombies had lurched into view, a motley crew of doctors, patients, and people in civilian attire. At the same time, the stairwell door they had come through crashed open, and the soldiers they had heard trudging down the stairs, burst into view. The shooting started immediately; short bursts and single shots, always aimed at the head. There was no doubt in Tom's mind that these guys knew exactly what they were dealing with.

Ben Kimball leveled the assault rifle in his hands, a Rambo-esque scowl on his face, and before Tom could stop him, he opened fire. The M4 roared loudly, the barrel jerking crazily as Kimball was driven back by the force of the recoil. He tripped over his own feet and sprawled on the ground, sending bullets zigzagging crazily into the ceiling. Down the hallway, the last zombie fell with a wet _smack_, scattering its brains across the floor. The soldiers, having dealt with one problem, now turned to deal with another. The shooting started again; Tom could sense the projectiles zipping past him like deadly mosquitoes with a lethal sting.

"Go, come on!" Tom cried, aiming his gun. "Get moving!"

The others needed no encouragement, and ran past him around the corner, ducking and weaving randomly to avoid the gunfire. Joe hauled Ben Kimball to his feet and shoved him in the direction of safety, before drawing his gun and aiming down the corridor. The soldiers moved forward, firing in bursts. Tom aimed his pistol and fired, shooting to hurt rather than kill. He didn't want to kill anybody if he could avoid it, not until he knew the full story. The first two bullets he fired found a mark, and one of the soldiers went down, clutching his leg. Tom popped the empty clip and slammed another one home, just as a fusillade of bullets hammered into the wall, less than a foot away from his face. That decided him. Tom motioned to Joe, who expended the last of his bullets at the soldiers, before ducking and running to Tom's side of the corridor, wincing as bullets cracked past his face. Tom fired another shot, catching a soldier in the arm, and beat a hasty retreat just as the wall was blasted away by fire from a heavy-caliber rifle.

"Don't stop, fucking run!" Tom cried to the others, rounding the corner and pelting down the corridor. Together, the eight of them charged down the corridor, Ben Kimball leading the flight, his tie flapping behind him, whilst Tom brought up the rear, expecting bullets to stitch through his chest at any second. They passed through a set of double doors that had been choked open. Tom turned around and slammed them both shut, moving faster than he ever would have believed possible. There was an empty stretcher pressed up against a nearby wall, and Tom grabbed it, steering it into place behind the doors and using his foot to press the switch that locked the wheels in place. Finally, he withdrew the nightstick from his belt, and slid it between the door handles. It would serve to buy them some time.

"Tom! Jesus, come on!" Joe shouted.

Satisfied with his temporary barricade, Tom followed the others. Behind him, something thudded against the doors, causing them to shudder heavily, unable to open against the weight of the stretcher and the nightstick holding the handles together. Voices cried out in angry exasperation, but Tom ignored them and rounded the corner, nearly running into Don Jackson.

"What's the matter?" Tom asked, looking over Jackson's shoulder. "Why've you..."

They had arrived at the ambulance entrance, used to ferry emergency patients into the hospital. From what Tom could see, it had accepted its last delivery. An ambulance had smashed through the wall beside the entrance with enough force to reduce the whole thing to rubble, and now it lay on its side, half in and half out of the hospital, with its lights still pulsing weakly. The entire entrance was blocked with wreckage, sealing them off from the outside world.

"Goddammit." Don Jackson said. "It's blocked off."

"Well thanks for that, dude." Kimball said. "Do you really need to state the freaking obvious?"

"Do you need to be an asshole every time you open your mouth?" Jackson shot back angrily.

Nerves were rising. Tom was a cop, not a psychologist, but he could tell that tensions, ignited by the situation they found themselves in, were starting to flare.

"Sandra, Dr. Allen," Tom said, firmly overriding Ben Kimball's angry response. "Is there another way out of this hell hole?"

"I…I don't know," Dr. Allen mumbled. "There could be, uh…maybe…"

"There's an exit further down this corridor that leads round the side of the building." Sandra told him. "The smokers lounge was being renovated, so the staff use it as somewhere to go and light up. There's a gate that blocks it off from the parking lot, but it shouldn't be locked. I can't guarantee it won't be crawling with soldiers, but it looks like we're running out of options."

"Right, that's great." Tom said. Something, the sole of a soldiers boot perhaps, thudded heavily against the barricaded door. "That's not gonna hold them back much longer, so if we're gonna go we've got to _do it now._" He focused his words on Don Jackson and Ben Kimball in particular, who glared at each other until Don eventually dropped his gaze. His wife's hand found his, and he put an arm around her.

"Okay, then." Tom finished. "Let's go."

They headed down the next corridor in this devil's maze of a hospital. Tom swept the hall and doorways with his gun, becoming aware that his hands were slick with sweat. He breathed slowly, telling himself to take it easy, take it slow, they were nearly home free and there was no need to panic now.

One of the undead lurched from an office, a slumped figure in a soiled hospital gown that reached for him with an arm that terminated in a bloody stump just below the elbow. Tom shoved it away angrily, before leveling his pistol and its head and blowing its brains across the wall.

_Why the brain?_ Tom thought. _They're technically dead anyway, so why does the destroying the brain stop them?_

The survivors pressed on, stepping over destroyed furniture and mincing uneasily around dead bodies. They were everywhere now, people who had either been shot or partially ripped apart. Tom had seen bodies before, plenty of them, but nowhere had he seen people who had died with such brutality, and in such high numbers.

"This place stinks." Ben Kimball observed.

Asshole though he was, Ben Kimball was right. The smell of death pervaded the entire hospital, along with a strange, sour-sweet tang, like meat that had been left in a cold, damp room for months on end. If they didn't get out soon, Tom thought the smell would drive him mad. He turned the corner, and squinted, shielding his eyes against unexpected sunlight. An open door stood before them, a picturesque gateway to freedom with warm midday sunshine coursing through it, and dancing motes of dust swimming through the air

"We made it," Christine Jackson said, her voice that of a daydreamer. "We actually made it."

"We're not safe until we're out of here." Tom stepped forward. "Who's got a car?"

"I think ours is probably closest." Don Jackson said. "We parked near the main doors, but I don't think we'll all fit inside."

"I left my pickup a little further up." George Evans said. "It's a four door; the rest of us could take that."

"Great," Tom said. "Make sure you keep your eyes open out there, everyone. I don't know how many of those fucks are out there, zombie or otherwise, but we need to keep our heads down and keep moving. Joe, you and I take point, okay? Joe?"

But Joe wasn't listening. His attention was rooted to the corridor that led to the post-natal unit.

"Joe c'mon, man!" Tom grabbed his friends shoulder. "We've got to get…oh my God."

His eyes had landed on the thing that had caught Joe's attention. And its eyes had caught him too, settling on him with vicious interest, the small irises tinged with blood and glinting like the blade of a knife. Of all the things that this hospital of horrors could have conjured up, this blood-soaked apparition from the post-natal unit was worse than anything Tom had ever seen. It raised a very small hand, as if reaching for him.

For Michael Allen M.D., the hysteria that had been slowly dissipating reasserted itself with sudden intensity. The doctor screamed at the top of his lungs, his hands clawing at his face as though he wanted to scratch his own eyes out, to rid himself of the sight before him. Suddenly, his eyes rolled up into his head and he fell to the floor in a dead faint. Sandra went down on one knee, touching a finger to the side of the Doctor's neck.

"He's fainted but I think he'll come round." She looked up at the bloody figure crawling slowly towards her, and her face became ashen. "Can we go now? Please?"

Tom crouched down and boosted the unconscious doctor up, lifting him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry.

"Come in, it can't hurt us unless we stick around." He said.

Outside, the sun was beating down and the breeze was fluttering the canopy of the trees above. An eye-watering mélange of scents reached Tom's nose, that sick-sweet meat stench compounded by a fuming odor of gasoline. He was in a wide alleyway, bordered on one side by the hospital walls, and on the other by a high chain link fence, crowned with whirling spools of glinting razor wire.

"Okay, it's clear." Tom called.

One by one the others filed out, turning their faces up to the sun as though they had never expected to see it again. But Don Jackson lingered in the doorway, looking uneasily back at the crawling figure. He raised the dead soldier's pistol, his hand trembling infirmly, and put his finger on the trigger. His hand stayed where it was for a moment, the trembling growing worse, before finally lowering again.

"I…I thought, y'know…I should put him out of his misery." He said. "But…I can't, I just can't."

"No-one expects you to, son." George Evans said gently. "I think whoever he was, he's gone now. He isn't suffering."

Tom reached over and pulled the door shut.

* * *

Inside, five pairs of combat boots stepped round the corner, heels squeaking on the floor. The squad leader looked around, his breathing distorted and alien through his gas mask. He thumbed a button on his radio and spoke into an intercom built into his helmet.

"Control, this is Sigma. Area clear; targets have extracted from the building, do you want us to pursue?"

"Negative 16, evacuate your wounded and expedite to second floor. Hold position on the stairwell. Bravo will patch any leaks."

"Copy that. Sigma out." The squad leader turned to one of his men, and pointed at the crawling figure on the floor. "Take care of that."

"With pleasure." The soldier raised his rifle and in one quick movement, fired. The undead infant stilled, and moved no more.

* * *

Tom could hear gunfire crackling distantly all around them; irregular rifle fire, and once, the hoarse rumble of a heavy caliber machine gun. Tom scanned the parking lot, ignoring the growing ache in his shoulders from carrying the unconscious doctor. He could see people flitting from car to car, sometimes on their own, sometimes in groups. They were not the only ones who had managed to escape it seemed. The soldier's precious cordon had been breached.

Don Jackson had identified his car as the grey Pontiac about fifteen spaces away. George Evans' pickup was a little further ahead, perhaps another ten spaces after the Pontiac. Joe, Sandra, the Jackson's, and the unconscious Dr. Allen would go in the Pontiac. Tom, George and Kimball would follow behind in the pickup.

A gunshot rang out in the building behind them, and Tom knew that was their cue to get the hell out of dodge.

They moved quickly and quietly, using the cars for cover, stopping every five seconds to get the lay of the land, and listen for anyone approaching. More gunfire rang out, right behind them. Soldiers were rappelling down the side of the building on ropes, shooting through the windows. They were focused on the hospital right now, too intent on dealing with what was going on in the building to fix their attention on the parking lot.

They reached the Pontiac, and Don Jackson unlocked it with a button on his key. The car honked twice, the sound echoing across the parking lot

"_Fucking bastard._" Ben Kimball hissed at it.

"Come on move it, before anyone-" Tom's words were cut off as a bullet zipped past his ear, tearing off the Pontiac's wing mirror. "Get down!"

Another bullet whizzed past, putting a hole the size of a fist in the car door. Tom twisted around, looking for the attacker, but the parking lot behind them was deserted. His eyes roved almost reluctantly up to the hospital, where he caught the flash of sunlight on metal in one of the windows.

"Shit, it's a sniper!" Tom cried.

Pulling the passenger door open, Tom threw the unconscious Dr. Allen inside, wincing as another bullet passed overhead.

"Get in, get in!" He said to the others.

"We're not all gonna fit in there!" Ben Kimball protested.

"_Are you crazy, man?_" Tom roared. "_There's a fucking sniper! Get in the car!_"

Kimball threw himself in the backseat without hesitation, and Sandra followed close behind at Joe's urging. Don pushed Christine in behind her and slammed the door shut.

* * *

Three floors up and seven windows across, the sniper curled his finger delicately around the trigger of his rifle. The world around him diminished, retreating into a blurred haze of muffled, unimportant sounds. Through the telescopic scope, the grey Pontiac was as big as a house, as crystal clear as though he could reach out and touch it. The sniper was in the ultimate state of awareness, something he liked to refer to as "being in the zone."

Two of the targets were wearing blue uniforms; cops. But that was unimportant. When you were in "the zone", all targets were free. Millimeter by millimeter, the sniper increased the pressure on the trigger. This bullet would go straight through the head of the first cop, the one who appeared to be calling the shots. The next would—

A sound pierced through the veil; a high-pitched, whistling shriek. The sniper tore himself away from the scope immediately and twisted round on the floor, grabbing the automatic pistol that lay on top of his knapsack. It was not a moment too late. The zombie was halfway across the room when the burst of 9mm bullets tore its head off.

"Dammit, Torres!" He called. "I thought this area was secure!"

"Situations fluctuating," Torres said, sticking his head through the door. "We got hostiles moving down from the fourth floor; you want to make yourself useful, get up off your ass and help us secure the north wing."

"Hot damn." The sniper muttered, standing up and shouldering his rifle. Below, the targets were still swarming into their vehicle. Well good luck to the fuckers. They were going to need it.

* * *

"Start the car!" Tom said, slamming his fist on the dashboard.

Don fumbled with the key, desperately trying to slot it into the ignition. Tom glanced out of the windshield and saw what roughly equated to his worst nightmare. At least ten to fifteen zombies were pelting across the tarmac, running at full speed towards them like Olympic athletes. Behind this group another thirty or so zombies who were too fucked up to run were shambling after them.

"Uh, we've got a problem back here!" Joe called, seeing the shapes of another dozen zombies looming up through the rear windshield.

_Jesus freaking Christ no!_ Tom thought. Not now! Not when they were so goddam close!

"Got it!" Don Jackson shouted, as the car rumbled into life. He threw the Pontiac into reverse and floored it out of the parking space, evading the rapidly closing noose of the undead. Tom gripped the dashboard, his knuckles white, as the Pontiac screeched through the demolition-derby of a parking lot, jouncing madly as it rolled over the galaxies of debris that littered the parking lot.

Tom looked up at the rearview mirror and caught a last glimpse of County General retreating behind them, the last soldiers finishing their descent down the side of the building.

"You guys okay back there?" He asked.

"I feel like a Mexican." Ben Kimball said, squashed in between Joe and Dr. Allen, who was groggily coming round.

"Sure, whatever." Tom said, turning back. The Pontiac drove through the main gates unopposed, swerving around wrecked and stalled cars. They turned onto the street, and Tom saw his cruiser, exactly where they had parked it a million years ago.

"Hold it a sec; I've got to get something." Tom said.

"I don't think that's a great idea, officer." George said, wedged uncomfortably between the passenger and drivers seats.

"Keep the engine running. If anything happens, just drive away."

Don pulled the car over reluctantly, and Tom climbed out whilst it was still moving, heading to where the cruiser was parked on the curb. He felt exposed out on the street, as though a hundred hostile observers could be watching from behind every tree and vehicle.

Tom had left the police car's door unlocked, and he opened it now, listening to the squawk of unintelligible, panicked voices from the radio. Tom retrieved the Remington 870P shotgun from under the dashboard, laying it across the seat while he withdrew an extra box of shells and several clips for his and Joe's guns from a special compartment in the glove box.

That was all he needed; Tom stuffed the clips and the box of shells into his pockets, and trotted back to the Pontiac, the Remington held across his chest. Through the windshield he saw Don and George pointing madly at something behind him, and at the same time, Tom's ears became aware of the slap of shoe leather on the sidewalk.

He spun round, placing the butt of the shotgun to his shoulder and squeezing the trigger. The zombie's head was blown off in a deafening cough of gunfire. Tom pumped the action, ejecting the empty shell and letting it clatter to the ground beside the zombie's corpse.

If zombies could be said to _have_ a corpse, when they were technically already dead.

"You're lucky you got fast reflexes, son." George Evans said, patting Tom on the shoulder as he climbed back inside the car. "That guy nearly had you for lunch."

Tom found he could summon no words. He nodded his head. Don put his foot down, driving past the abandoned cruiser and turning off Denver Avenue, no destination in mind, only the necessity to put as much distance between themselves and that damned hospital as possible.

"Crap." Joe said softly.

A convoy of military vehicles was rolling towards them in the opposite lane. Tom saw Bradley's, Stryker Armored Vehicles, and truck after truck filled with soldiers. Humvees with machine guns and automatic grenade launchers, things that had been safely confined to TV reports about the Iraq War, were now roving up a street in Chicago. Tom expected one of the machine guns to pivot at any second, and riddle the tiny Pontiac with fifty-caliber bullets. But the convoy kept on going, paying them no more heed than a man would pay a microbe. They had business to attend to at the hospital, it seemed. The last vehicle flashed past, and then it was gone.

"Vietnam comes to the Midwest." George said softly. "Jesus Christ."

Behind them, the last vehicle turned onto Denver and disappeared. Flames flickered from the roof of the crippled hospital at the top of the hill, and spread until the whole building was wearing a crown of fire.


	10. Trapped

Chapter Ten – Trapped

_There's something happening here_  
_ What it is aint exactly clear_  
_ There's a man with a gun over there_  
_ Telling me i got to beware - _Buffalo Springfield

"So, where now?"

Ben Kimball's question hung in the air unanswered as the Pontiac cruised down the street, doing a steady twenty and jouncing whenever it hit one of the potholes that the city council had never gotten round to fixing. Of course now, potholes were the least of the council's worries.

Tom, the Remington propped between his knees with the safety on, looked into the side mirror and saw County General Hospital retreating behind them. As he watched, a red-orange flower bloomed from a set of windows in the upper left wing of the building, and solidified into a pall of black, oily smoke. There was a three-vehicle smash blocking the road ahead; two cars and a truck. One car lay under the trucks front wheels, and was so wrecked that it no longer resembled an automobile, but rather a twisted, meaningless piece of junk.

Don Jackson twisted the wheel, and the Pontiac mounted the grassy median strip that separated the opposing lanes, swerving around the wreck. Out of the corner of his eye, Tom saw a pale, blood-spattered arm hanging limply from the truck's cab.

"Can I put the radio on, Don?" He asked. "I'm gonna try to find some news."

"Sure, good idea."

"I'll do it." George Evans, who was practically wedged in between the driver's and the passenger's seats, leaned forward and switched on the radio, grimacing as Lady Gaga began assuring him that he would never reach her telephone.

Tom breathed a small sigh of relief. Apparently, it hadn't gotten bad enough for them to suspend regular programming – not yet anyway. George flicked through channels until he reached WGN, one of the major news stations.

"_-have been reported in Brighton Park and Ashburn. At 111__th__ Street Station, all services have been cancelled due to reports of a body, or multiple bodies on the line; we'll have more on that when we can get it. We're still receiving more reports on that incident at…uh, County General Hospital, Morgan Park, where most of the violence is reportedly centered. Several eyewitnesses report gunfire and loud explosions, so if you're in that area I'd recommend you steer clear."_

The station went on to play a pre-recorded message from the Deputy Police Superintendent. As Tom expected, it was the usual vague, unhelpful bullshit that the police brass often spewed out when they either had no idea what was going on, or had some idea, but didn't want anybody to know it. The Deputy Superintendent concluded by saying that there was no cause for alarm (completely disregarding the fact that thousands, maybe millions of Chicagoans had seen a severed hand fall to the ground on live television only a matter of hours ago), and advised people in unaffected areas to continue their day-to-day business as usual.

"Continue day-to-day business?" Joe repeated, as if saying the words out loud would make them sound less ridiculous. It didn't. "That's crazy; they should get everyone out while they can!"

"They probably want to avoid panic." Don suggested. "If everyone drops what they're doing and runs for the hills, there's gonna be chaos on an epic scale."

"And if everyone stays where they are, then they'll die." Sandra said, her eyes haunted by memories of the carnage at the hospital. "Surely they know what's really going on by now?"

"Believe me, they probably do." Tom concluded quietly.

"Which brings us back to my question," Ben Kimball said, putting emphasis on each word. "Where are we gonna go from here?"

Tom thanked God for what must have been the umpteenth time that Vicky was visiting her parents in New England. They lived in some seaside town called Ogunquit, Maine, nearly a thousand miles away from Chicago. Tom's own parents, wanting to leave the hustle and bustle of the city behind when they retired, had moved to Allerton, Illinois. It was pretty far away, but who could tell how fast this thing would spread? Perhaps it wasn't far away enough. Perhaps nowhere was.

A chopper soared overhead, its underbelly bristling with armament, its rotors beating at the air as it disappeared over the rooftops in the direction of The Loop, Chicago's central commercial district.

"I…I mean, we should probably, uh, get out of the city while we can, right?" Ben Kimball commented as he watched this dark omen pass over.

"What?" Don Jackson said. "And go where? I've got a job, a house, a mortgage; I can't just drop everything and leave."

Tom saw the logic in Don's argument. He might not have had any family in the city, but he had a house and a job that he couldn't afford to leave behind. And whilst his job as a police officer was mainly a way to help put food on the table and keep a roof over his and Vicky's heads, he still felt a sense of duty. There were men and women wearing the same blue uniform as him who would be out there at the roadblocks this morning, without a clue about what was going to hit them. The ones that didn't go around assaulting bartenders and breaking into houses were decent, honest people, and Tom couldn't run away while they fought and bled and died on the streets.

"Forget the house, hon." Christine Jackson advised her husband from the back seat. "What's important is that we get to safety."

"I know, but…_Jesus._" Don thumped the wheel in frustration. "I still don't understand any of this. I mean, everything's just happening too fast, first people are trying to eat us, and then…oh my God, I _shot_ someone."

Don's eyes fell on the 9mm that lay on the dashboard. His wife leaned forward and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.

"You had no choice, buddy." Joe said. "None of us did. Whoever these people were…before, they're not human now. They can't be. Now it's a case of kill or be killed."

In the back seat, Sandra turned to Dr. Allen, who was squashed up against the window, massaging his forehead woozily.

"Are you feeling okay, doctor?" She asked. "You had a hell of a fall back there."

"Yes, I think so…" The man said. "Where…where are we? We were leaving the hospital and then…"

"You fainted, Chuck Norris." Kimball remarked. "We had to carry you out of there."

"We did?" Joe asked. "I thought that was Tom."

"I fainted?" Dr. Allen asked. "I don't remember. We were running, and then…oh." Recollection came into the doctor's eyes, and he leaned forward, putting his head in his hands as the dam of temporary amnesia burst and the images flooded back into his mind.

"Okay, so the way I see it, we have a few choices." Tom offered. "We can get the hell out of dodge and leave the city right now, stick around and hope this thing doesn't get any worse, or split up and go our separate ways. What do you guys think? Anyone have any family in the city they need to get in touch with?"

"Yeah, how about my ex-wife?" Ben Kimball suggested sarcastically, before laughing a little too loudly.

George Evans' wife had died three years back, he told them, living just long enough to see his son get hitched and move out west to start a family in California. Dr. Allen had a wife and kid back home in Aurora, about thirty miles to the west. It was pretty far away, but the doctor faced the same question that Tom did when it came to his parents in Allerton; was it far away enough? Ben Kimball on the other hand, made it clear he didn't have anyone in the city he gave a rat's ass about. Tom didn't know whether to roll his eyes or feel sorry for the guy.

"I need to get in touch with my mom and dad." Sandra said. "Can I borrow someone's cell phone?"

While Sandra spoke to her parent's with increasing frustration on Don's cell phone, Tom kept his gaze fixed on the passing streets. They were just under a mile away from the intersection of West 111th, where he, Joe and two dozen other cops had been attacked by the swarm of undead earlier that morning.

"Turn right here, man." He advised Don. "You don't want to go on West 111th. There was a whole horde of them out there earlier."

Don nodded, turning the wheel and taking a detour up 107th. A station wagon cut across them, its roof piled high with cardboard boxes and suitcases that were practically bulging with clothes and other possessions. It swerved, tires screeching, and one of the suitcases that hadn't been properly tied down fell off and burst open on the ground, spilling clothes and underwear across the street.

"That was close." Don said, turning on the wipers to get rid of a bra that had plastered itself across the windshield. "It looks like we're not the only ones trying to get out of here."

A second later, and Tom saw why. Most of the doors on this street had been broken down and now lay on the driveways of the houses they had belonged to, a testimony to the relentless strength of the undead. Windows were smashed, allowing curtains to flutter in the breeze. A car lay canted in a ditch with all four of its doors hanging open, and its engine still running. Tom cracked the window an inch, and caught a whiff of that familiar rotting meat stench floating on the wind; the final, definitive sign that they were now passing through undead country.

Don thumbed a button on the dashboard and the Pontiac's doors locked with a reassuring _clunk_.

"Keep your foot down, Don." Christine said quietly. "Don't stop for anything."

The car's engine was worryingly loud amid the unnatural silence of the street, but if there were zombies in the houses around them, its constant drone failed to attract their curiosity. They were most likely too busy feasting on the houses former occupants.

Then, out of the corner of Tom's eye, movement. A man with his shirt soaked in blood lunged from the shadows of an open door, flying straight off the porch steps and landing flat on his face. Whatever these things were, they were fucking stupid, that was for sure. The car sailed past him as he clambered upright and shot after them, giving chase with long, loping strides.

"He's chasing us," Joe said, twisting around to look out the rear window. "I thought zombies were supposed to be _slow_, dammit."

Don's response was to put his foot down. The needle on the speedometer jumped to thirty, and then climbed steadily. The zombie kept up with them for about two hundred yards before its attention was caught by new, easier prey and it veered off from the chase, making a beeline for an open garage door. The Pontiac took the next left, taking them past Mt. Greenwood Cemetery, with its wrought-iron fences and meticulously-tended hedges. Tom eye's scanned the landscape of rank-and-file grey headstones, flitting to the statues of angels with their cold stone eyes staring right back at him. He saw no toppled headstones; no areas were the ground had burst open as the shambling masses of the undead clawed their way back into the sun; no signs of disturbance whatsoever. Wherever this encroaching infection was sprouting from, Mt. Greenwood Cemetery was not it. They drove on.

"Dad, come on," Sandra was saying. "Why would I be telling you to do this if…yeah, I'm fine, but you need to…look, just do it, okay? No, she won't mind…_yes_, I'm sure. Okay, I have to go, now listen; it'll be for two days maximum…I'll be there as soon as possible, I promise. Okay, goodbye. I love you."

Sandra flipped Don's phone shut, blowing a strand of hair out of her eyes with an irritated _huff._

"Well they're going to stay with my Mom's sister in Milwaukee. It's not that far away, but it's better than them staying here."

"Did you tell them about the, uh…zombies?" Joe asked, the last word almost inaudible.

"No, of course not." Sandra said, handing Don's phone back. "I just told them that I'd seen these _riots_ firsthand, and I thought it would be a good idea for them to head to Aunt Sally's for a while. They've been meaning to go anyway."

Next, it was Dr. Allen's turn. The M.D. nearly dropped the phone twice in his haste to dial home, and was biting his lip hard enough to draw blood. Tom heard a muffled dial tone ring out twice, before it was replaced by a single unbroken bleep.

"No signal." Allen said weakly. He hit the redial button twice more, and both times he was confronted by the impassive electronic bleep that blocked him from his family home in Aurora.

"Let me take a look." Joe said. Dr. Allen passed the phone over, and Joe held it up to the Pontiac's low ceiling. "Yep; it's dead. I can't get a signal at all."

"Damn cell phones," George said. "Can't make head or tail of 'em; there's bound to be a lot of folks trying to get hold of the emergency services though, that's for sure. Phone networks probably can't cope with the strain."

Tom nodded, hoping that was the explanation, and that another, more sinister one wasn't lurking below the surface. Dr. Allen burst into tears.

* * *

They were on West Monterey Avenue, which connected to the highway via an interchange. The street was deserted, the houses and businesses still and silent. More than once Tom felt the weight of someone's gaze through the windshield, and saw fingers poking through the closed blinds of someone's home. Twice he saw bodies lying by the roadside. Don drove through a red light on the empty intersection and took the Pontiac down the highway's entrance ramp.

"Aw, crap." Tom groaned, running a hand through his hair.

All three lanes of the highway heading south were blocked by legions of honking, gesticulating, angry motorists, their vehicles crammed in bumper to bumper. The traffic jam stretched out for at least a quarter of a mile before disappearing around the corner. This tailback was physically no worse than the usual rush hour congestion that blocked the city's highways, but there was a frantic, on-edge atmosphere that pervaded the interstate. More fists were being shaken than usual, more horns were blatting angrily, and more cars were nudging the vehicles in front of them as though an epidemic of road rage had infected the minds of Chicago's commuters. Overhead, the sky was darkening, heralding the approach of a rain shower that would do nothing to improve the moods of the motorists.

"What's the fucking holdup?" Ben Kimball asked, leaning over the driver's seat to get a better look.

"The whole highway's blocked," Don said. He gestured out the windshield in disbelief and exasperation. "Jesus, this could go on for goddam miles."

"You want to keep driving?" Tom suggested. "I'll walk down and see what's going on."

"Okay, sure." Don flicked the turn stalk and edged his way into the snaking traffic, whilst Tom unbuckled his seat belt and replaced the magazine in his Glock, making sure he had a couple of extras just in case. The Remington he handed to Joe; walking down the highway with a loaded shotgun wasn't a good idea. If his blood splattered uniform didn't alarm people, then that certainly would.

"Be careful, man." Joe advised as Tom stepped out of the car.

"I will." He replied. "Keep the doors locked."

Tom shut his door behind him and set off down the highway, heading south in the direction the traffic was facing. For every dozen or so cars, there was at least one that had some item of luggage on its roof. A lot of these people were simply commuters who had gotten snarled up in the traffic on their way to work in the southern districts of 'Chicagoland'. However, like Tom and his group, some of them had set off with the express intention of leaving the city, only to have something stop them.

Curious gazes were shot from the people in their cars as their eyes were drawn to his stained uniform. Tom didn't blame them; he was covered in the blood of God knew how many people, with a helping of parking lot dirt thrown in for good measure, and he was fairly certain that there was at least one shoe print stamped across his back. He must have looked like a hell of a poster boy for the Police Department.

Tom walked on for about fifteen minutes, during which time the traffic remained completely stationary. The stench of exhaust fumes was steadily thickening in the air, making his stomach pitch and roll. Still, anything beat the rotting meat smell of the undead, which the highway was thankfully free of – for now. As Tom passed under the bridge at 119th Street, the rain began to patter down on the roofs of the cars, and the wind picked up, stirring litter in the gutters. Winter was coming, no doubt about it.

_Good luck running from zombies in two feet of snow._

That was when Tom saw the barricade. Two eight-wheeled armored trucks had been parked, nose to nose, across the highway, making all three lanes impassible. The same had been done in the opposite three lanes, the ones that led into the city. Angry scenes were unfolding at the head of the traffic jam, as frustrated motorists confronted the squad of soldiers patrolling the barricade, shouting and gesticulating with mounting anger, only to be met by what seemed to be silent indifference on the part of the armed men. Still, silence was a better response than a hail of bullets. Tom was torn between retreating back to the safety of the car, and marching straight up to the roadblock to find out what the hell was going on. He had been lucky to get away from these psychos once before, whoever the hell they were, but doubted he would manage it a second time.

Tom took a deep breath, hitching up his belt and smoothing out the creases in his uniform. He started to walk down the highway, feeling a lot like a man about to stroll into a lion's cage. Suddenly, a guy was in his face.

"Hey, you're a cop right?" The man said. "What the hell's going on here? These guys can't just close the highway like this!"

"It's under control, sir." Tom said. "In the meantime, you should get back in your car and wait."

"But this is ridiculous!" He protested. "What gives them the right to just seal everyone off like this? I oughta go over there and-"

"Sir, those men at the barricade aren't screwing around, okay?" Tom said frankly. "Don't mess with them. You want my advice, get back in your car, and lock the door."

"Right, sure." The man said quietly. His anger had momentarily subsided, allowing him to clearly notice Tom's bloodied clothes, and his overall battle-weary countenance. He cast another curious eye over Tom before retreating back to his vehicle. By this time, the rain was falling thick and fast, and Tom could feel the first drops of water trickling down his face, leaving clear tracks like tears in the mud and grime.

_Here goes nothing._

Tom picked out one of the soldiers at random, a motionless statuette of a man guarding the end of the barricade, nearest to the highway wall.

"Uh, hello there." Tom said, hoping he sounded amiable enough.

The soldiers head turned, and he looked at Tom through the lenses of his gas mask, down which rain was running in rivulets. For a moment, Tom was certain he would get no response. Then;

"Yes?"

The soldier's reply was terse, if not exactly rude.

"Well, I just wondered if you could tell me exactly what's going on here." Tom said. "Only, you guys seem to have blocked off the whole highway leading out of the city, so…"

"No."

"I'm sorry, I didn't catch that." Tom said.

"No." The soldier repeated. "Information is on a need to know basis."

"Right." Tom replied, elongating the word in his uncertainty of what to say next. "Only, I'm a police officer, so I was wondering if you need me to provide any, uh…assistance."

"The situation is under control sir, now please step away."

"It's just-"

"Step away, sir."

"I was-"

"Sir, I won't tell you again." The soldier warned. "Step away."

"Alright, listen here." Tom snarled, as his fear melted away and his desperation turned into anger. "I don't know who the hell you people think you are, but you can't just block off the highway for no goddam reason, and then stand there and give me that 'need-to-know basis' crap. I'm a cop, in case you didn't hear me the first time, and I have a right to know what the fuck is going on here, you got that?"

The soldier was silent. Christ, if only Tom could see the man's face, and gauge his emotions. He was still very conscious that there was a loaded assault rifle between the two of them, and it was in the hands of a man whose buddies had no qualms about gunning down civilians.

_Okay,_ Tom thought. _One last gamble._

"It's the zombies, isn't it?" He asked quietly, his voice barely audible over the musical patter of the rain.

The soldier's head twitched slightly. To anyone else, it would have been unnoticeable, but Tom had been trained to study body language since he joined the force. There was no doubt that Tom's question had caught the man off guard.

"You know what I'm talking about." Tom continued. "I can tell. Listen, if there's something going on-"

"Sir, I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about." The soldier interrupted. "We're here to protect the public against the ongoing riots in-"

"_Bullshit!_" Tom cut in fiercely. "Who the fuck do you think you're kidding? I've seen people missing limbs running around like finalists at the goddam Olympics. How do you explain that?"

Silence from the soldier. The rain continued to pour steadily down. Behind them, cars honked and men shouted.

"You've done something, haven't you?" Tom asked. "And now you're all here to cover it up. What was it, huh? What the hell did you sons of bitches _do_?"

Then, Tom heard it. Over the drumming of the rain and the cries of angry motorists, came the growingly familiar snarl of the undead. He span round, his hand already going for his gun, as his eyes tried to track down the source of the sound. There – a man in a White Sox cap was slamming his bloodied fists against the windshield of a car, howling at the screaming family inside. Tom drew his gun and sighted down, but before he had the chance to fire, a gunshot rang out somewhere off to his left. One of the soldiers on the barricade had already dropped to one knee and blown the zombie's brains out the side of its skull with his rifle.

Tom lowered his gun slowly as four soldiers peeled off from the barricade and stormed up the highway to where the man's corpse lay. Two of them grabbed him; one by the arms and the other by the legs, and they began to carry him away. Meanwhile, the other two went over to the car that the undead man had come from. Tom saw one of them reach inside and forcibly drag out a screaming woman sitting in the passenger seat. Her arms were covered in bruises and scratches were she had tried to defend herself against the reanimated corpse that was once her husband. As she was pulled from her vehicle, one of the rear doors opened, and a crying young boy that could have been her son ran out, only to be grabbed under the arms by the soldier and lifted, kicking and screaming, in the air. Tom started forward without even a half-assed plan in his head, his hand unfastening the holster on his belt.

Someone seized his arm and held him back. At the same time, the barrel of a gun was thrust under his jaw.

"Don't get involved." The soldier hissed, his voice venomous. "It's none of your concern."

Tom's equally venomous response was cut off by the sound of an approaching engine. A man on a Yamaha bike came roaring towards them, zipping in and out of the cars, sending people sprawling in their attempts to get out of the way. There was a gap at the end of the barricade, where the rear bumper of one of the military trucks was separated from the highway's edge by a space of about seven feet. With a twist of the throttle, the biker shot straight for it, closing the gap between him and freedom within the space of seconds.

Behind Tom, one of the trucks roared to life. A soldier, sitting up in the cab, threw the gear back and hit reverse. The truck, all twenty tons of it, rolled backwards on its enormous wheels, closing the space between the rear bumper and the highway wall. For the biker, there was nothing to be done. With a sickening crunch, he collided with the truck's chassis with enough force to shatter his helmet. His visor, streaked with blood, looped through the air and clattered to the ground at Tom's feet, whilst the Yamaha screeched under the truck's tires, leaving a burst of sparks in its wake.

A tsunami of fear swept down the highway, obliterating common sense and reason with its uncanny ability to replace clear thinking with blind panic. The drivers of the vehicles closest to the barricade were the first ones to lose it, throwing their cars into reverse in their attempts to get away, only to end up causing a multitude of fender-benders as they smashed into the cars behind them. The highway was filled with the sound of smashing glass and tinkling metal.

More screams rang out. Tom saw half-glimpsed figures lunging amongst the vehicles, lurching lopsidedly after their prey.

_This place is going to hell in a hand basket,_ Tom thought. _Time to check out._

Tom threw his head back, connecting solidly with the soldier's mask, and simultaneously smacking the barrel of the rifle away from his face. He twisted round, wrenching free of the man's grip and placing both hands on the gun; one on the barrel and the other on the shoulder stock. The soldier fought with remarkable strength, and Tom's feet were being dragged forward across the tarmac even as his hands refused to relinquish the weapon.

"Fuck – zombie!" Tom cried, staring at an empty space behind his opponent. The ploy worked, and the man threw a split-second glance over his shoulder. A split-second was all Tom needed. He wrenched the assault rifle from the soldier's grasp and slammed the stock of the weapon into his throat, sending the man staggering back, spluttering and clutching his throat. Tom turned and ran; sprinting straight down the breakdown lane with the assault rifle, an M4A1 carbine with both selective-fire and full-auto settings, clutched in both hands. Behind him, the soldier grabbed his pistol from the holster on his vest, and took aim. Tom Everett's rapidly retreating head was directly in his sights when a man scrambled over the hood of a nearby car and began to lurch towards him. The soldier made a minor adjustment to his aim and fired, blowing apart the creature's head. When he turned back, the lucky cop had disappeared. To hell with it, the soldier thought. He had bigger fish to fry now.

* * *

Further down the Interstate, Joe stood with his arms resting on the open car door, one ear cocked to the steady stream of generally useless crap issuing from the radio. The Kimball guy was sat on the grassy verge at the edge of the highway, smoking a cigarette and glancing up and down the Interstate. Joe reminded himself to keep an eye on the guy. He had no doubt that Kimball would end up getting them all killed if it meant an opportunity to save his own ass.

"You okay, hon?" A hand on his shoulder. Sandra.

"Fine," He said, smiling. "You should stay in the car; it's not safe out here."

Sandra made a dismissive gesture with her hand, looking up and down the unmoving columns of traffic. Many people were abandoning their cars now, and venturing up the highway to find out what was going on. Some dumbass on a Yamaha went speeding up the Interstate, doing an easy fifty. The dumbass was going to get himself, (and most likely someone else) killed if he wasn't careful.

Beside him, Sandra bit her lip, her eyes going cloudy.

"You know…" She started, before trailing off and shaking her head.

"What is it?" Joe asked.

"Nothing; forget about it."

"Go on." He nudged her gently. "You can tell me."

"It's just…" Sandra turned her face up to his, and for the first time Joe saw the first real traces of fear in his fiancée's eyes. "Those things – whatever they are – I don't want to end up like them."

"That isn't going to happen." Joe said fiercely. "I swear, I'm not gonna let anything happen to you."

"I know, I know." She replied softly. "But the bites are the vector of infection, no doubt about it. When someone gets bitten, that's it – you join them. Am I right?"

"Well, I don't know any more than you, but…yeah, I guess. Where are you going with this?"

Sandra opened her mouth, and closed it again, apparently struggling to make the words come out. Eventually she said;

"I need you to promise me that, if it happens…if I get bitten…that you'll end it. You'll-"

"Whoa, what the hell?" Joe asked incredulously. "What are you saying?"

"I'm not scared of…of dying." She said, looking him straight in the eye. "But I've seen those things and I don't want to be one of them. If I get bitten, I need you to promise me that you'll do the right thing."

"Sandra, that's crazy," Joe protested, his head whirling. "I'm not gonna-"

"Do you love me?"

"Of course I do."

"Then, if it does happen, you'll do it. Please."

Joe opened his mouth to respond, when the crack of a gunshot rang out somewhere in the distance, cutting Joe's words off as abruptly as if he himself had been shot. Ben Kimball jumped to his feet like a deer startled by the crack of a hunter's rifle. Thin screams were rising somewhere down the highway; in the direction Tom had taken. They were followed by the discordant jingle of what could have been a car crash.

"We're leaving." Ben Kimball announced, squashing himself back in the car. "C'mon, let's go."

"We're not going anywhere." Joe said. "Not until Tom's back."

"What the _fuck_, man?" Kimball protested. "Have you heard the shit that's going on up there? You're buddy's already dead. Let's get the hell out while we can."

"Can we even get out of this?" The old man asked Don Jackson. "Looks to me like we're blocked in front and back."

"We might have enough room to drive up on the grass if we're lucky." Don said. "At this point a few scratches on the paintwork are the least of my worries."

"Well then what the fuck are you waiting for?" Kimball cried. "Get moving!"

People were streaming north, away from the direction of the gunfire. Joe couldn't spot a single blue uniform among them.

_C'mon buddy, where are you?_

* * *

Tom vaulted over the hood of the car closest to him, doing his best to ignore the blood-soaked windows, or the fact that the vehicle was rocking and reeling as though someone was having a hell of a good time inside. In reality, Tom knew that they were probably having anything but.

A man in a torn-up sweater and grey khakis hit the ground in front of Tom with the unmistakable crunch of a breaking nose. He let out something that was probably supposed to be a snarl, but came out more like a wet gurgle. When the guy rose to his feet, Tom saw why. Everything from his chest cavity to his left hip had been pretty well eviscerated. Tom could see the pale outline of the man's ribs poking out of what remained of his ruined chest. Behind them was a dark, glistening shape that could have been his heart. Whatever it was, it was still and silent now, along with all the other major internal organs. But for some impossible reason, whether virus or witchcraft, the man moved regardless, paying no attention to the crippled state of his body.

With a grunt of disgust, Tom lifted the M4 and squeezed the trigger. The carbine was a lot bigger than anything he had fired before, but any lack of accuracy was compensated for by the short range of the target. The 5.56mm bullet split the top of the zombie's head open and painted blood and brains across the white paintwork of the van behind it. Tom leaped over the zombie's corpse and sprinted the rest of the way, weaving in and out of panicking motorists who were now abandoning their cars en masse. Twice he tripped on something lying across his path; and neither time could he bring himself to look back and see what it was.

Carrying the M4 by the shoulder strap, Tom jumped up onto the hood of an abandoned black Lexus, and from there onto the roof of the van behind it. From this vantage point he thought, or maybe vainly hoped, that he could make out the small grey roof of the Pontiac, perhaps about forty yards away. Another ten miles or so beyond that was the skyline of Downtown Chicago, dominated by the dark steel and glass sentinel that was the Sears (_Willis, dammit, Willis_, Tom reminded himself)Tower.

Something crashed into the side of the van hard enough to rock it on its heels, forcing Tom to jump off before he fell and broke his neck. Another one of them was in his face; a big guy in a shredded suit that wouldn't have looked out of place on a downtown business executive before it became splattered with its owner's blood. Raising the M4 again, Tom squeezed the trigger; in the eye, out the back of the head. The procedure was becoming disturbingly familiar. The cooling corpse had barely hit the ground before Tom was running past it again, listening out for the sound of footsteps running after him. He didn't want to risk shooting a glance over his shoulder in case he ran right into one of them while looking in the opposite direction. Still, the chaotic sounds around him were melting and merging into one another like paint on a canvas, and it was impossible to tell if anyone was chasing him by sound alone. All Tom could do was keep running and hope for the best. It felt as though he had been doing that almost none-stop for the past three days.

The whicker of rotor blades thudded through Tom's heart as a chopper swooped overhead, ropes dropping from its body. More soldiers began to rappel down to the highway, firing their weapons with a one-handed accuracy that had to be seen to be believed. Tom had no idea who these fuckers were, but they were straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, that was for damn sure.

Tom squeezed between the rear bumper of a red Fiesta and the hood of the SUV behind it, and ran up onto the grass at the edge of the highway. From here he could run straight up the grass and be off this fucking highway for good, if he wanted to. But the others were still down there, waiting for him. If they were still alive, that was.

_Don't think like that, of course they're still alive._

A man came scrambling up the grass on all fours, like a rabid dog, snorting and grunting as streamers of blood issued from his mouth. Behind him came a further seven or eight sprinting corpses, their dusty-marble like eyes fixed on him. Tom fumbled with the switch on the M4A1's body, flicking it from single-shot to fully automatic with fingers that were shaking like those of a man in the final stages of Parkinson's disease. He slammed the stock clumsily to his shoulder again, and let the carbine roar away on full automatic. Unlike Ben Kimball, he had the proficiency not to let the recoil push him over, but that didn't mean his shots were going anywhere useful. One burst riddled an abandoned car's driver door with bullet holes; another tore a zombie's arm off at the shoulder, with absolutely no reaction from the arm's owner whatsoever. There was a black circular tube mounted under the M4's barrel, with a trigger just in front on the weapon's magazine. In desperation, Tom hefted the barrel up slightly, and without stopping to think properly, lest hindsight stay his hand, he squeezed the trigger. There was a quick _phut_ as the projectile left the tube and arced through the air. An almost unbearable second followed in which Tom began to regret even pulling the trigger. He was too close, too damn close, he could end up being-

The grenade hit with a _bang_, right in the midst of the oncoming zombies. Tom tripped backwards and covered his head with his hands. Between his splayed fingers he saw a severed leg go whirling over his head. Dirt, blood and soil pattered back to Earth around him.

_Oh Jesus, that was fucking crazy._

Tom got shakily back to his feet and took off again, throwing one last look over his shoulder. In spite of the explosion, they were still coming after him. Those who had lost legs were dragging themselves by the hands, their nails digging up tufts of grass. One man's head, decapitated from its body, was still staring after him, gnashing its broken teeth futilely.

Tom ran, and never looked back.

* * *

Joe raised the pistol, and shot the zombie through the chest, staggering it long enough to get a bead on the thing's head.

_Bang._

It slumped to the ground, as the second shot destroyed its brain once and for all. The fucker had come from nowhere, and had nearly gotten him. The situation was worsening; more and more people were fleeing their cars, leaving themselves open to attack. Joe found himself whirling around, trying to look everywhere at once, a feat that would have been a lot easier if he had eyes in the back and sides of his head.

"That's it, get back in the car man, we're getting outta here." Kimball yammered from the back seat.

Joe ignored him, still scanning the tumult for any signs of a dude in a blue uniform. Where the frick was Tom? He couldn't just leave him out here, but every second they stayed meant the chances of their escaping were shrinking rapidly. Every second put the others in danger, and he had sworn a promise to Sandra that he wouldn't let anything happen to her. He wasn't going to renege on that so long as he lived.

_Ah shit, I'm so sorry dude._

Joe turned back to the car, ready to tell Don to put his foot down and get them all out of here. But that was when Ben Kimball, who had been eyeing the object on the Pontiac's dashboard for the past five minutes, decided to take his chance. He lunged forward and swiped the 9mm handgun from beside the steering wheel, and proceeded to point it at Jackson's head. Pandemonium erupted.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

"Oh my Christ, put that thing down!"

"Son, I really don't think you want to do this!"

Kimball ignored them all, keeping the trembling pistol trained on the side of Don Jackson's head. Don sat ramrod straight, his eyes fixed on the rear of the car in front of them, his face expressionless.

"Listen, I don't want to hurt you," Kimball was saying. "But if you don't start the car, I'll...I'll…"

"You'll do what, tough guy?" Don snarled. "You don't have the guts, you fucking coward."

"Mr. Kimball, I think you need to sit back and think about what you're doing." George Evans weighed in, with the ever calm and reasoned voice that Joe was already starting to respect him for.

"George is right, sir." Joe said, keeping his voice calm in spite of his rising anger. This dumbass was putting them all in danger. "Just put the gun down and…"

Things happened very quickly after that. There was a primal screech over Joe's shoulder. He span round, bringing his pistol to shoulder height, as the woman ran at him, still screeching and groaning.

_Bang._

She went down, as the last bullet in Joe's clip embedded itself in her forehead. In the car, Kimball's attention was momentarily torn away from Don. The momentary lapse of concentration caused an involuntary slackening of his index finger, which was still on the M9's trigger. George Evans saw his opportunity and grabbed for it – literally. One of his knotted hands wrapped around Kimball's wrist and forced it upward. The gun went off with a bang that temporarily deafened the occupants of the small Pontiac, punching a 9mm hole in the car's roof. Christine Jackson was next into the ring; she went for Kimball's face with her nails, leaving angry red scratches down the man's right cheek. Joe ran around the back of the Pontiac, intending to pull open the door on Kimball's side and haul the bastard out if necessary. As it happened, someone else got there before him.

"Hey, asshole." A voice said.

Kimball turned his head just in time to see the butt of Tom Everett's rifle smash into his left temple. As he slumped back in his seat, the gun fell somewhere into the back seat area. Dr. Allen leaned forward to catch it, ended up juggling with it for a few seconds, and finally got it by the barrel without triggering it off.

"Good to see you, buddy." Joe said, feeling a grin stretch across his face in spite of himself. "What the hell took you so long?"

"Uh, zombies, commandos, helicopters; you know, the usual." Tom replied. "Don, you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine, thanks." Don turned around, glaring into the back seat. "But what do we do with him?"

"Nothing, unless you want me to pull him out and leave him to the zombies." Tom said. "Listen, I know that sounds tempting, but he's not a threat anymore. I'll cuff him if it makes you feel better, man, but I don't think leaving him to be slaughtered is the right move."

"Yeah, you're right." Don said. "Just don't expect me to trust him again."

"Gotcha." Tom said. "Can you get us out of here?"

"Uh, I dunno." Don admitted. "We're blocked in front and back, only way out is to take the embankment straight back up to the street."

"Fuck it; go for it."

In the end, they made it; just. The Pontiac screeched, its tires spewing up mud and bits of grass, and Tom was horribly certain that it would stall and start rolling back down to the highway, where they would probably wind up smashing into the blue Chrysler they had been stuck behind. But Don slammed his foot down one more time, and with a final screech the Pontiac jumped forward onto the sidewalk, and then dropped slightly, jouncing them all in their seats as they hit the road.

"Nice work, Don." Tom clapped him on the back.

"Thanks, but uh…where now?"

"I don't know. They had the whole highway blocked off down there; trucks, guns, the whole deal. I wouldn't be surprised if they're roping off the whole city right now."

Dr. Allen turned to stare in morbid horror, his eyes practically bugging out. The idea that they might be trapped here in the city was a new and totally horrifying concept to him.

"You're saying we might be _trapped_ here?" He asked, horror-struck.

"I dunno…maybe." Tom said. He couldn't think of another damn thing to say; he felt exhausted, and as the levels of adrenaline in his body fell, all he wanted to do was close his eyes and sleep. Shoving the thought aside, Tom leaned forward and turned in the radio.

"_-in both Ashburn and Westside, along with those reports we had earlier of the explosion at the Green Line station on Lake Street. The police cordon in Avondale along North Milwaukee Avenue is still in effect, and they're not letting anyone through, so I'd recommend you avoid that area._

"_Jack is there any word on a possible motive of these rioters? Is this violence racially motivated in any way?"_

"_That seems to be the official line that the police are taking, Ben. However, I can say from personal experience that the people participating in these attacks seem to belong to many groups regardless of race, age or social occupation. I personally saw a man in a suit carrying a pistol walking down Milwaukee Avenue about ten minutes ago, so…_"

Tom listened, shaking his head. There was no talk about the soldiers; about the armored vehicles or the helicopters; nothing about County General or the barricade on the highway.

"It's spreading," Dr. Allen noted. His eyes were wide with fear. "Avondale, Morgan Park, West Side…if this virus keeps spreading it could be all over the city by tonight."

Tom dug his knuckles into his eyes, warding off the fatigue that was threatening to envelop him. The highway was screwed, so there was no chance of them getting out that way. And if I-57 had been sealed off, it was a sure bet that the other major highways, such as the Kennedy Expressway, the Eisenhower, and the Stevenson were all closed. Were these guys honestly planning to throw a cordon around the whole city? Could they do that?

If they couldn't escape, they would have to find some place to hole up. Somewhere fortified, that could be easily defended. But where?

"Drive on, Don." Tom said wearily. "We'll think of something."

Don spun the wheel doubtfully, and the Pontiac rolled up Vincennes Avenue like some small creature scurrying through the underbrush, trying to evade the teeth of a fierce predator. In the distance, unseen to those in the car, the afternoon sun caught the windows of Downtown Chicago's doomed skyscrapers, and they glittered like hoarded treasure for one of the last times.


	11. The Land of Opportunity

Chapter 11 - The Land of Opportunity

Chicago City Hall

2:00pm

Richard F. Harrison, the 55th Mayor of Chicago, crossed his arms over his chest, and regarded the two men on the other side of his desk with derisive contempt, his eyes flitting from one to the other. The men stared right back, not looking particularly impressed – if anything, they looked bored, and eager to be out of here. They didn't seem to realize that they were speaking to the _Mayor,_ and it was about damn time he received an explanation as to what was happening in his city.

"I'm sorry gentlemen, but I'm not going to set one foot out of this office until you tell me what's going on here."

_There; that outta do it._

The man standing to the left fetched a deep sigh from the bottom of his chest, the kind an exasperated parent might use whilst dealing with an unruly child. He was wearing a dark Armani suit with a navy blue tie, and carrying a laptop computer bound in blue tape under his arm. From his clean-shaven cheeks to the toes of his well-polished shoes, Mayor Harrison recognized the appearance of a typical, government pod-person. Albeit, one who knew how to dress.

"Mayor Harrison, sir." The man said, an edge of impatience to his voice. "Rest assured, everything will be explained to you as soon as possible. But, right now we need to extract you from the city. There's a helicopter waiting-"

"You don't seem to understand, Mr.…"

"My name is Agent Dodgson," The man said flatly. "James Dodgson."

"I see…" Mayor Harrison nodded. "Agent Dodgson, I'm going to put this simply. I've been ducking and fucking around you people for the past four days now, and I'm getting sick of it. You barge in here claiming to belong to a Federal agency that I've never even heard of, saying you have an _Executive Order _to begin a military operation in this city, in order to combat an unspecified epidemic that is somehow linked to the riots we're currently experiencing, but you can't even give me a straight answer when I ask you a simple question. What are you trying to hide?"

"Sir, all of your questions will be answered in time, I assure you." Agent Dodgson assured him. "There's a helicopter on the roof which will take you to Washington D.C.; everything will explained there."

"_Washington D.C.?_" The Mayor exclaimed. "_Washington D.C.? _What the hell do I need to go to D.C. for? I start two weeks of vacation tomorrow, dammit! My wife and I were supposed to be taking the kids to Honolulu!"

The two men exchanged a glance that Mayor Harrison didn't appreciate. It was a 'Geez, can you believe this guy?' kind of look. Agent Dodgson took the laptop from under his arm and snapped the tape with his thumb, whilst his colleague retrieved a cell phone from the breast pocket of his jacket, and began to dial, wandering to the other end of the office as he did so. Harrison watched him with suspicion, only looking away when he realized that Agent Dodgson was sliding something onto the desk in front of him. It was the laptop, now free of its binding tape, and with the screen open. The fan whirred as it booted up, and some kind of governmental logo followed the initial Dell loading screen. It was one that the Mayor had never seen before; the head of a bald eagle surrounded by a circle of fifty stars, with a lightning bolt arcing across the background. A border that ran around the circular logo read; DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL OPERATIONS – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Beneath it flashed a red warning:

_This computer and all enclosed documents are property of the Federal Government, and are classified top secret,_ the page read. _Unauthorized access and/or distribution is a treasonous offence under Article III, Section Three of the United States Constitution, and is punishable by death or a minimum penalty of life imprisonment._

Mayor Harrison watched as Dodgson's fingers scuttled over the keyboard like spiders, punching in a password that gave him access to the desktop. The word 'treason' kept pulsing its own red warning in the back of Harrison's mind. By the looks of it, he was about to get into some highly classified shit. For some reason, the hairs on the nape of his neck began to prickle. Dodgson typed in another password to access a folder, and swiveled the laptop back in Harrison's direction.

"W-what am I looking at?" The Mayor managed to ask.

Dodgson shrugged. "Just have a look around, sir."

"Do I, uh…have authorization to view these files?"

A faint smile curled the edges of the man's mouth. "You won't be executed, if that's what you're thinking, sir."

The Mayor selected one of the documents at random, his piqued curiosity surpassing the dark cloud of uncertainty and fear that whirled in his brain. It was a video file, approximately a minute long, and labeled 'Haven, Connecticut – 1992.' The town's name was the newest addition to a long list of things that Harrison had never heard of. Regardless, he clicked the video and was greeted by shaky, handheld footage that pitched and yawed as the camera was carried up the front porch of somebody's house. The door swung in with a crash, and there was the thunder of multiple pairs of boots storming across the floor. A living room flashed past – television, sofa, and magazines on the coffee table- and then the camera was jolting up the stairs, swinging into what looked like the master bedroom. Tinny explosions rang out from the laptop's speakers, and Harrison flinched as he realized they were gunshots. The view swiveled nauseatingly again, pointing into the corner of the room. A hunched figure in soiled nightwear was being driven back against the wall by the force of the bullets. Harrison pushed himself away from the laptop on the wheels of his chair, and clapped a chubby hand over his mouth.

Dodgson meanwhile, was checking his watch nonchalantly. "We were lucky that time," He remarked. "It remained confined to the house."

The camera panned across the dead woman's body, from her blood-stained legs to the hole in her forehead. Her face was contorted into a savage expression of rage that was fearsome even in death, and looking at it, Harrison felt the two Whammy burgers and the side order of milkshake and fries that he had ordered for lunch begin to rise in his stomach, like a nuclear missile escaping its silo. He put his hand back over his mouth and stifled a nervous belch.

"Are you okay, sir?" Agent Dodgson asked, and Harrison could have sworn that a faint smile was playing around the man's lips. "You look a little, ah…pale."

"I'm fine." Harrison said, not feeling fine at all, yet reasonably sure that the contents of his stomach were not going to go nuclear just yet. "What in the hell did I just watch?"

"Footage shot by one of our men during a cleanup operation in Haven, Connecticut, in the summer of 1992." Dodgson responded. "The woman who was just killed, Mr. Mayor, is what we in the trade refer to as a zombie; or if you want to use the official designation, a Type Zero specimen. A fully mobile corpse that has no other purpose but to consume other living humans, who are in turn, transformed into similar mindless automatons, starting a chain of infection that can only be ended once all the zombies are destroyed, or there are no humans left to consume. That's the kind of chain that's being built in your city as we speak sir, and its growing rapidly."

Harrison gaped at the man, his own thoughts nothing but a meaningless crackle of white noise. His hand began to move over the touchpad again, apparently of its own volition, and before Harrison knew it, he had opened another file. It was a black and white image of a man lying on a cold metal table, with his body surgically opened from throat to navel. All of his internal organs had been removed, leaving his body a dark, empty shell. His arms, legs, and even his genitalia were all gone, amputated with laser like precision, leaving him a cavernous, empty husk. The only thing that remained was his head, the eyes bright and horribly aware. Whatever it was, it was still conscious. The caption in the bottom-right corner read 'Mexico City – 1970', and was stamped with the Department of Special Operations seal.

In Mayor Harrison's stomach, some internal commander gave the order to 'fire a broadside'. The Mayor practically flew across his office as though someone had attached rocket boosters to his shoes, and disappeared out the door with his hand over his mouth. Agent Dodgson watched him go, his eyebrows raised as he suppressed the urge to burst out laughing. He had seen a lot of similar reactions in his time, and he was not particularly surprised. Nobody could deny that the Mayor had just witnessed some fairly gruesome stuff.

Dodgson packed up the laptop, glancing at the photos on Harrison's desk. Between his phone, and his Truman-style placard reading "The buck stops here", were pictures of his smiling wife and kids. Looking at them, Dodgson felt a faint pang of sadness tug at his heart, like a small child tugging at the hem of his father's coat. His own marriage had withered up and blown away a few years ago, taking his son with it off to Cali, along with his ex-wife. It wasn't that they hadn't loved each other, but every day it felt as though there was an invisible force keeping the two of them apart, like a wall made of bulletproof glass. Dodgson knew what that invisible force was; it was shadow-spun, cloak-and-dagger world of covert operations. Sometimes he could be on assignment for months, and when he was home, there were too many hushed phone calls that were hastily ended when she walked in the room; too many instances where he didn't get home until the early hours of the morning. She began to accuse him of screwing another woman. The final straw came when she caught the scent of perfume on his collar. He tried to assuage her wrath, but what the fuck could he have told her?

_Hey honey, it's okay. The chick was just a New York Times reporter who knew a little too much about an arms deal that went bad over in the Mid-East, and who just wouldn't quit no matter how much money we tried to give her. I musta' got her perfume on me when I hauled her, kicking and screaming into the back of that black van, then watched it roar off into the night towards some harbor in the Big Apple. Don't sweat it._

In the end, he had said nothing, and his job had split them apart like the stresses on its hull split apart the _Titanic_.

The Mayor reentered the room, wiping the back of his hand and looking fairly embarrassed.

"I-I'm sorry," The pudgy man stuttered. "Don't know what came over me."

"I wouldn't worry about it, sir." Agent Dodgson replied, the laptop back under his arm. "You're not the first, and I doubt you'll be the last."

Dodgson's colleague, who had been talking on his phone in a low voice, now wandered back into the center of the office. "Mr. Mayor, there's somebody on the phone who would like to speak to you."

The Mayor took the cell with slightly trembling fingers, taking deep, calming breaths. When the image of the man with his body carved out like a Halloween pumpkin rose again in his mind, Harrison pushed it firmly away. He was the Mayor, dammit. He had to take control.

"This is the Mayor speaking." Harrison declared.

"Mayor Harrison," A male voice replied. It was calm and authoritative, and Harrison recognized it almost immediately as belonging to a certain former Senator for Illinois. "This is the President of the United States speaking."

"Mr. President, sir…" Harrison said, feeling himself deflate like a tire being driven over a bank of jagged glass.

"I understand you've been giving these boys some trouble, is that right?" The President said.

Harrison fought to stop himself from stammering. "I-I simply wanted to be aware of all the facts, Mr. President. Chicago's in uproar out there, and-"

"I understand this is difficult, Mayor." The President said calmly. "Of course I do. But I need you to hold it together, is that clear?"

"Of course, Mr. President," Harrison said. "B-but my wife; my children-"

"Preparations are already underway to transport them out of the city. They'll stay at The Mayflower here in D.C. for the duration of the…incident. Now can I count on you to get in that helicopter without any further trouble?"

"Yes, Mr. President."

"Thank you." The President said, sounding relieved. "I'll see you in the Oval Office within three hours."

With a click, the line went dead. Harrison passed the phone back to its owner, who replaced it within the folds of his suit without a word. Outside the window, the Mayor could hear the looping whine of sirens passing in the street below, and although it was likely a product of an imagination that was currently in overdrive, he thought he could hear the distant _whupwhupwhup_ of the helicopter on the roof.

"We should get moving, sir." Dodgson said. "The helicopter's on standby to take off as soon as we're onboard, and it's probably wasting precious fuel."

"Yes, yes, of course." Harrison said heavily. "But what's going to happen here, Agent Dodgson? What's going to happen to my city?"

Dodgson exchanged a grim glance with his colleague. "We'll stop this thing, Mr. Mayor; no matter what it takes."

Harrison ran a hand through his thinning hair. His previously neat and orderly world was rapidly being pitched upside down, like a table of cards being upended by an angry drunk. Everything was spilling out of control, with no acceptable answer as to why.

Washington. Washington was where he would find the answers.

"I'll get my coat."

* * *

In the White House situation room, the President replaced the phone and drummed his fingers on the polished wooden table. Events were surging forward like a locomotive threatening to go off the rails at any second, and it was clear that the infection was far more widespread than anyone had dared to believe. The screens on the far wall were splashed with images of rapidly escalating violence and destruction, as cars and storefronts burned and police lights strobed across sidewalks littered with jagged seas of broken glass. At this rate, Chicago would be a quagmire of cannibalistic madness before the day was up. How was that for change you could believe in?

"Mayor Harrison is on his way." The President announced. "This is your show Jack; how much do you think we should tell him when he gets here?"

Jack Cleveland, the boyish, clean-shaven Director of Special Operations clicked his pen thoughtfully. "Well, we need to consider the obvious implications of bringing another person into the loop on this, Mr. President. He'll have to sign an A-1-A Protocol swearing him to secrecy before we can divulge any information. I gave my men on the ground authorization to tell him whatever was necessary if it would help to get him on that helicopter, so he should probably sign the protocol the second he gets here."

The President nodded, looking around the table at his assembled staff. "Does anybody have anything to add?"

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs chimed in then; "Mr. President, I would recommend raising the defense readiness condition of our Armed Forces. Should this contagion spread further and potentially become a nationwide epidemic, then we don't want any, uh _outside influences_ taking advantage of our potentially weakened state."

"Ah, the last thing we need now is to start a confrontation, General." The President warned. "We have enough going on in our farmyard as it is."

"I understand that, Mr. President." The Chairman assured him. "However, we have our interests in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to think about, not to mention our commitment to our allies in the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula. If the United States is seen to be in a vulnerable position, then-"

"That'll be enough for now General, thank you." The President said, amputating the Chairman's discourse and turning to the Secretary of State. "Hillary, what's the situation with regards to the rest of the world? How much do they know?"

"Ambassador Yesui has been trying to get in touch repeatedly," The Secretary of State said, clacking her fingernails against the table surface. "Beijing's demanding to know what's going on, and whether what they suspect is true. Foreign Secretary Hague has also been on the phone – he says MI6 has 'credible evidence' that an outbreak is occurring on American soil, and London would like to know what steps are being taken to counter it."

The President nodded, reviewing the notes laid out before him. They faced an interesting quandary. The virus that was currently festering on American soil posed a unique threat to security of every nation on the planet. With that in mind, there was always a chance, no matter how small, of a world power taking 'desperate measures' to protect themselves from an outbreak on foreign soil before it could spread to their own country. The stark truth was that most of the nuclear-armed powers would rather go to war with the United States than risk having an outbreak occur within their country's borders. For that reason, there was always a possibility that if this outbreak continued to spread, they would see it 'cured' by the medicinal properties of a few Russian or Chinese ICBMs.

For that reason, the rest of world needed to know that America was fully committed to destroying this infection. Raising the DEFCON level would help the US to prepare for any hostile action, no matter how small the possibility of such an occurrence might be.

"General, instruct NORAD and each of the Combatant Commands to elevate their alert level to DEFCON four. Make sure the Fifth Fleet and the Seventh Fleet are prepared for any eventuality. I want to stress that this is simply a precautionary measure, people. Nobody is looking to start a confrontation, especially not now." The President turned to the Secretary of Homeland Security. "Janet, have the National Advisory System placed on high alert; we need to keep the public informed about what's going on, and what steps they can take to protect themselves."

"Mr. President, bear in mind that we can only tell the public so much-"Jack Cleveland began.

"I'm aware of that, Jack." The President said. "But we can still tell people in Chicago about the basic precautions they can take to defend themselves and their families. We owe them that much, at least. Now, I need to contact Premier Jiabao and Prime Minister Cameron, so unless anyone has anything else to add, I suggest we take a short recess and reconvene at 3pm. Jack, I want a direct line to Oakbrook Park set up for when we return."

"Yes, Mr. President."

As the cabinet dispersed, the President briefly flipped through his notes again. The riot cover story was the best one they had so far, but it wouldn't hold for long. Soon the media would begin prying at every facet of it, like the ocean trying to find some way to breach the hull of a rowing boat. They had to stamp the virus out, eradicate it, and scorch it away if necessary; just so long as the truth stayed where it was supposed to be; locked up.

After all, it was for the good of the country.

* * *

Mike Bowman had always been something of an opportunist. To him, the secret of success was to seize the moment and twist it to whatever purpose currently suited him. And now, sat in the back of a blue Ferrari 456 on this rainy September afternoon, he found himself in a whole land of opportunity. He had seen the news reports when he flicked the tube on this morning, everyone had. Rumor was that half the PD had been diverted to Morgan Park and the other affected neighborhoods, leaving the force at only half of its usual strength in the rest of the city. When Mike had heard, his heart had literally jumped for joy in his chest. They had been planning to do this sometime around December 1, but with the cops distracted elsewhere, this was too good an opportunity for them to miss; it was as if the Big Guy himself was trying to lend them a celestial hand.

"We ready to go, Mike?" Wade Johnson - formerly Lance Corporal Wade Johnson, US Marine Corps. The brass kicked his ass right back to the States after he accidentally shot up a bunch of people in Helmand or whatever the fuck it was. Mike had been in need of someone with his 'expertise' when it came to being under fire, and had offered him a placed amongst his 'crew' almost immediately after they had been introduced.

Mike checked his watch. It was 3:30pm. Overhead, huge, pregnant thunderclouds were lolling across the sky. "Chris, you ready?"

Chris Lucas nodded, a dusting of fine white powder around his nostrils. Chris was an ex-con who had done jail time for beating his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend to within an inch of his life with a length of metal piping, leaving the dude with almost every limb in his body broken, not to mention temporary amnesia. Mike had a suspicion that Chris might be a little crazy, but he would never say it to his face, you could bet your ass on that. The final man in their happy quartet was Steve Pritchard, their getaway driver. Not the sharpest tool in the box, but he knew how to put his foot down. Right now, he was staring out of the windshield with his hands gripping the steering wheel hard enough to make the veins around his knuckles pop out, running down his arms like power lines thrumming with electricity. Originally, there were supposed to be five of them; the fifth dude had gone and got himself checked into County General with a suspected heroin overdose. No matter; they could do this without him. It'd be like taking candy from a baby.

Leaning forward, Mike grabbed the gym bag that lay at his feet, grunting with the strain as he hauled it onto his knees. As Wade and Chris twisted around in their seats to watch, Mike unzipped the bag and hauled out five kilograms of burnished wood and winking chrome.

"Whoa," Wade remarked as the weapon was revealed; a gas-operated, fully automatic Kalashnikov rifle.

Mike laid the AK-47 across the empty seat beside him, and reached into the bag again, drawing out a second Kalashnikov and a SPAS-12 pump-action shotgun. Chris and Wade took their weapons like kids receiving presents on Christmas morning. Next came the gloves and the balaclavas; they didn't want to leave prints everywhere for the CSI teams to collect, and they certainly didn't want any witnesses describing their appearances to the cops.

"Remember guys," Mike said, flicking the safety off his Kalashnikov. "We don't want anybody dead if we can help it, but if someone gets in your way, don't hesitate to make an example of 'em. Got that?"

Chris and Wade nodded enthusiastically, eager to get moving.

"Steve, keep the car running," Mike instructed. "The second we're in, fucking floor it. Don't stop for anything."

"Got it."

Mike waited until the street was clear of foot traffic, and then stepped out of the Ferrari, putting the now empty gym bag over his shoulder and stowing the Kalashnikov under his coat. Wade and Chris joined him at his side, and together they stalked up the marble steps that led inside the First Bank of Chicago. The three men had approximately one-thousand rounds of ammunition between them. If this went as quickly and cleanly as Mike hoped it would, they would have no need for any of it.

Inside, the bank was fairly busy. There was a small queue waiting at the tellers windows at the far end of the room, while off to one side a woman in a shrieking-yellow dress was using the ATM machine. At one of the tellers windows, some loudmouth was complaining about money not being wired into his account. Boy, would he have something to complain about by the time this was over. Mike counted about twenty five heads in total, including the tellers behind their windows. They were outnumbered, but they sure as hell weren't outgunned.

"Alright fuckers, nobody move!" Mike cried. God, how many times had he lain awake at night running over those words in his head like a Shakespearean actor rehearsing for his soliloquy? How many times looking in the bathroom mirror, trying to get the pitch and tone just right? And now, the words spilled from his mouth, reverberating with intimidation as they echoed around the bank.

_Nice,_ Mike thought. _Very nice._

Across the room, heads turned and necks craned as people turned with interest to this surprising intrusion into their normal, daily lives. Seconds later, that interest turned to fear. A few people screamed with alarm, but most stayed rooted to the spot as their fear held them immobile, like a great invisible weight pressing down on them. To his credit, the security guard nearest to the door was pretty quick off the mark. His pistol was already out of its holster, while his other hand was halfway to the radio clipped to his chest. Unfortunately for him, Wade Johnson was faster.

"Don't even think about it." The former marine said, practically shoving the barrel of his SPAS-12 up the security guard's nose. "Put that thing on the ground and slide it across to me before someone gets hurt. And by someone, _I fuckin' mean you_."

The pistol was lowered cautiously to the ground, the guard handling it like an unexploded frag mine that could get him killed at any moment. With a gentle push, the pistol skated across the marble floor and came to a sudden stop under Wade Johnson's foot. Meanwhile, Mike and Chris stormed up to the tellers windows, driving the crowd off to either side like icebreakers moving through the Arctic ice fields. There was an unremarkable wooden door separating the tellers section from the rest of the bank. Mike knew that in reality, it was reinforced with several inches of solid steel, and totally impenetrable to gunfire. Brute force wouldn't give them access to the vault, so a little coercion was required.

"Open the door." Mike said, pointing his AK-47 at the scared face behind one of the windows, before quickly realizing the futility of such an effort. That shit would be totally bulletproof.

_Fine - new strategy._

Mike grabbed the nearest person he could reach, hauling them up to the window and shoving the Kalashnikov's barrel under the man's oddly swollen throat. Mike's bargaining chip emitted a guttural, phlegmy _gluh_ sound, and struggled weakly to get away. Mike was having none of it.

"You ever seen a person's head explode, ma'am?" He asked the teller behind the window. "It's not pretty, I can tell you. You open that door right now, or I'm gonna redecorate this whole fucking ceiling, understand?"

The frightened teller scrambled to the door, fumbling with a magnetic swipe card around her neck. She passed it through a card reader beside the window, and with a brief burring noise, the door unlocked. With the hostage's purpose fulfilled, Mike shoved him against the nearest wall, and kicked the door fully open.

"Get on the ground! Get on the fucking ground!"

Nobody was dumb enough to argue. In the customer area, Chris and Wade gestured with their weapons, and in the space of seconds, the banks inhabitants were face down on the cold marble surface, hands laced behind their heads.

"Where's the fucking manager?" Mike demanded, panting with adrenaline. Everything was going according to plan for now, assuming none of these bastards had triggered a silent alarm or something. To get to the next stage, they needed the person in charge. "Are you fuckers deaf, where's the goddam manager?"

"Okay, okay!" A man in a dark suit cried, climbing to his feet with his arms raised in surrender. "I'm the manager; just don't shoot!"

"Okay - Chris, take this dude down to the vault." Mike said, tossing the gym bag to his lackey. "Get everything you can fit in there. Wade and I will watch the kids."

As Chris and the manager descended the stairs, Mike distinctly heard the ex-con say; "You so much as twitch and I'll blow your head off."

Mike smiled - this was shaping up to be sort of fun. All they needed now was for the manager to open the vault. Then they would bag the cash and split. On the TV above the tellers windows, somebody had torched a car at the intersection of Illinois and LaSalle, and now coils of black smoke were unfurling into the sky as firefighters unloaded their equipment, and cops stood close at hand, speaking into radios and directing traffic. The scene was only a few blocks from here, and the realization caused the easy grin plastered on Mike Bowman's face to falter, and his expression darkened, like a bank of cloud passing over the face of the moon.

For the first time, Mike began to wonder whether these riots could end up being more of a hindrance than a help.

Meanwhile, Chris followed the bank manager down into the vault, keeping his Kalashnikov leveled at the man's lower back all the way. Their footfalls echoed hollowly as they descended the stairs, and apart from the manager's nervous breathing, all was silent. In spite of that, alarm bells were going off in Chris's head, and it wasn't just because of the coke. Something down here had put his hackles up.

They descended the last flight of steps and were in the bank's cellar. The vault door, a circular steel behemoth with a heart of concrete, was at the opposite end of the room. Chris wetted his lips in anticipation; behind that door lay heaps of cash, most of it probably stored in safety deposit boxes.

"Get the door open." Chris said, cutting off the manager's babbling flow of bullshit.

"Haven't you been listening to a word I've been saying?" The manager asked. He had hit the nail right on the head; Chris had been too busy thinking about how rich he was about to become to listen to anything the man might have had been saying. "The vaults on a time lock, I can't open it."

"What the fuck is it doing on a time lock in the middle of the day?" Chris asked, frowning.

"The riots," The manager said simply, his eyes switching from Chris's AK-47 to his increasingly fiery eyes. "W-we were closing the bank early…because of the riots, you know…we were just getting ready to ask everyone to leave when you-"

"How long until it opens?"

"It's set to unlock again at 6:00am tomorrow," The manager stuttered. "Until then I can't…"

During the course of his parade of half-assed excuses, the manager's watery eyes had strayed to a point just over Chris's burly left shoulder. They widened slightly, in recognition and surprise. Chris turned with a snarl, already raising the Kalashnikov.

"Freeze, don't move!" The security guard barked as his pistol aimed directly at Chris. When he saw that the raider had no intention of obeying this order, the guard fired, and a 9mm bullet punched through the raider's right shoulder.

_Bullshit!_

Chris's finger convulsed over the AK's trigger, and the Russian rifle hosed the entire wall down with bullets. The guard fell, his pistol dropping from his nerveless fingers as the bullet holes stitched their way across his chest. Faint wings of smoke drifted through the air as the last empty shell hit the ground with a meaningless clatter.

Chris put a hand to his burning shoulder, feeling warmth spilling through his fingers. His shoulder had been torn open from the clavicle to his upper arm, and was now gushing profusely.

"Oh my…_God_." The manager was saying, his eyes the size of dinner plates. His mouth worked like that of a cow chewing grass, but no further sound came out.

Chris stumbled over to the security guard's corpse, his face frozen in the same horrific mask of rage and hate that he had worn the day bludgeoned his ex-wife's boyfriend. He hefted the Kalashnikov again, and fired another burst into the dead man's stomach.

_Fucker shot me,_ he thought as his head reeled and his shoulder bellowed. _How'd you like this, fucker?_

The barrel of the Kalashnikov rose until it was pointing directly between the dead man's glazing eyes. As he tightened his grip on the trigger, intending to deliver another futile volley of fury upon the man's corpse, it happened. The security guard's eyes, resting on a point just to the left of Chris's feet, rolled upwards like marbles until they were staring him directly in the face. The man's mouth opened, allowing a treacle-like gush of blood to spatter across his uniform and the surrounding floor. Chris stumbled back, his own mouth hanging slightly agape in response.

With a sound like dead leaves slithering over a forest floor, the guard's legs began to shift. His hands began to clench and unclench threateningly, as his entire body twitched and jerked like a long-dead machine now rumbling back to life. But that was impossible; he had riddled the guy with over twenty bullets. He should have been dead as a fucking dodo.

Confronted by the impossible, Chris dealt with it the only way he knew how. The Kalashnikov roared as its magazine was emptied, and the bullets tore their way from the guard's stomach right up to his throat. Blood flew, spattering the legs of Chris's trousers until the weapon's roar finally died.

When it did, he rested the AK-47 against his shoulder, with the barrel pointing at the ceiling. His chest heaved as he panted heavily, grinning like the skull of a dead cow in the sun-bleached desert. That was that dealt with; now for the-

With a scream, the guard launched himself from the ground. His hands fell on both of Chris' shoulders, and the grin was - quite literally - torn from his face.

Upstairs, Mike heard the shooting clearly. Unfortunately, he had his own shit going on right now.

The bargaining chip- the man whose head Mike had threatened to blow off unless the door was opened-appeared to be dying. He lay slumped on the floor, clutching his chest and wheezing heavily. Every now and then a weak cough tore loose from his swollen throat.

"What's wrong with him?" Someone asked.

Mike shot them a look that clearly said 'mind your own fucking business'. In all honesty, he had no idea what was wrong with the guy, and the only real explanation seemed to be that he was having some kind of heart attack, brought on by the stress of the situation. And what the hell was going on downstairs? Chris must have run into extra security; Mike hoped he'd deal with them quick, because they needed to get out of here as soon as possible.

_Choo!_

The man gave a bellowing sneeze, spattering the floor with flecks of snot and blood. Mike drew back, his lip curled in disgust, as the man clutched his head as though the expulsion of mucus had pained him. His leg kicked out in a jarring spasm, and he fell still. Silence descended, and Mike's brain slowly began to comprehend what had happened.

Wade was still covering the security guard near the entrance with his shotgun. "Is he…?"

"I think so." Mike slowly approached the motionless man, poking him in the arm with the AK-47's barrel. Reluctantly, he went down on one knee and pressed two fingers against the man's neck, searching for a pulse. He found none.

Downstairs, another burst of gunfire rang out. Mike swore under his breath and stood up, turning his back on the dead man's corpse. What the fuck was Chris getting into down there?

"Mike, what do we do, man?" Wade asked.

Mike opened his mouth, about to tell Wade to shut up and let him think, when the door that led down to the vault slammed open. It was the manager, in full flight with his tie flapping over his shoulder as though it was waving a sarcastic goodbye to their pursuer.

"_Hey, where the fuck are you going?_" Mike bellowed.

The manager stopped dead in his tracks, his head flitting from the door to the barrel of Mike's gun.

"Your guy – the guard – dead –" The manager began, speaking in fractured, disjointed sentences. Mike couldn't make out a word the guy was saying, never mind trying to piece it together into something that made sense. Then the door, which had been gently swinging back towards its jamb, was flung open again, this time hard enough for it to slam against the wall with a hollow _boom_. Chris emerged from the shadows of the doorway, his shirt stained with blood. To Mike's stunned eyes, it looked as though half of his face had been ripped away, revealing the glistening bone and cartilage beyond. The sinewy fibers holding Chris's jaw together flexed as what remained of his mouth opened, emitting a hoarse shriek that stung Mike's ears.

"Chris, what's going on?" He asked, stunned.

Mike's accomplice bolted from the doorway, closing the distance between the two of them with ease. Behind him, a second man in a security guard's uniform had spilled from the shadows, lunging across the marble floor with an almost ape-like gait. Chris cannonballed in Mike's direction like an out of control locomotive, his hands hooked into claws. At that moment, Mike did the only thing he could think of; he slugged Chris in the face with the butt of his rifle, sending his accomplice staggering back.

"Chris, you dumb crazy bastard," He growled. "What the fuck do you think you're-?"

Chris lunged forward again, and his ragged jaw clinched down on Mike's shoulder. Blood spurted, and a red veil of pain descended over Mike's vision as Chris whipped his head from side to side, trying to pull a chunk of Mike's flesh away. Mike's Kalashnikov, its barrel sticking into Chris's gut, began to roar, expelling the man's innards from the holes it tore in his back. Chris pulled his head away from Mike's shoulder, taking a chunk of flesh with it. Mike watched, dazed by excruciating pain compounded with overwhelming horror as the chunk of flesh disappeared down Chris's throat.

_Jesus…fucking…Christ._

With one hand clapped to his bleeding shoulder, Mike raised the Kalashnikov again and fired, stumbling back as the force of the recoil hit him like a punch to the arm. For Chris Lucas, it was as though some sinister prankster had placed an M80 firecracker somewhere in his skull. His head caught the full force of the volley of bullets, and Mike stayed on his feet just long enough to see Chris tumble to the ground. Then he too went down, the pain in his shoulder flaring, ripping through him like gigantic shards of glass.

A pair of hands grabbed him before his head could make contact with the floor. Wade.

"Mike, we need to get the fuck outta here."

"No," Mike grabbed Wade by the front of his shirt, vaguely aware of the bloody handprint he left behind on the fabric. "The vault…the money…"

"Dude, fuck the money," Wade said, his voice breaking slightly. "If we don't get outta here now, we ain't never gonna make it."

Mike straightened up, doing his best to ignore the shriek of pain from his shoulder. He only needed to cast a brief glance around the bank to be aware of the chaos that was unfurling. People were running for the door; the bank's alarm was clanging away; the whole place was a mess, and it was only a matter of time before the cops came calling, riot or no riot.

_And we could have been so fucking rich._

"Go, go!" Mike said hoarsely.

The two robbers darted across the lobby, pushing their way through the escaping hostages. Out of the corner of his eye, Mike saw that the security guard had pulled somebody to the ground and had his face buried in the man's neck whilst another man tore at his arm. Mike looked away, repulsed, when it became clear that the limb's days of being attached in its socket were grievously numbered.

_Better him than me._

Out the doors they went, into the street where rain was still pouring from the steel sky. In spite of the insistent whooping of the bank's alarm system, Mike could hear sirens rising and falling in the distance. Whether they were racing in this direction or not, he had no idea. They reached the rain-washed sidewalk and Mike's eyes darted up and down the street, searching for the blue Ferrari. Where was it? If Steve had fucking run out on them, Mike was going to personally cut his -

Two horn blasts interrupted Mike's angry thoughts, and he saw the Ferrari parked across the street. Steve was hanging half in and half out of the window, gesturing for them to get a move on. With a final glance back at the bank, Mike tore across the street, ignoring the shocks glances and occasional screams that the AK-47 in his hand earned him.

"What the fuck happened in there?" Steve asked as Mike opened the door and slipped back inside. "Where's Chris?"

"Dead. Now drive."

Steve was practical enough not to ask any more questions. As soon as Wade slammed the door shut he threw the car into gear and they roared down the street, paying no heed to the red traffic lights at the intersection. As they passed the bank, Mike noticed a familiar face amongst the throng that was scattering out from the bank in all directions, like grain being sowed across a field. It was the man with the swollen throat, the one who had keeled over and died right in front of him. Being dead didn't seem to bother the guy much, and it certainly wasn't stopping him from tackling people to the ground and tearing their throats out.

Mike tore his balaclava off and flung it onto the floor whilst he inspected the wound that Chris inflicted upon his shoulder. It was fucking bad, alright. Blood was cascading down his arm and smearing over the Ferrari's leather seats.

"Mike, I…Jesus, are you bleeding?"

"Just shut up and drive the goddam car, Steve." Mike growled, coughing as he pulled his jacket off and then began to rip the sleeve of his shirt. He ineptly tied it around his shoulder in a makeshift tourniquet, in the hope that this would at least slow the bleeding. Within seconds, crimson blood roses had begun to bloom across the white fabric. Still, it would have to do for now.

Mike leaned back and closed his eyes, listening to the roar of the Ferrari's five-liter engine. Just what the fuck had happened back there anyway? Chris had finally snapped; there was no doubt about that. Mike knew that taking him on had been a huge mistake. But what the hell had been wrong with him? And what about that other guard? And that guy? What had happened in there?

"What do we do now, man?" Wade asked cautiously.

"We go back to the apartment and think this shit over," Mike said after a long pause. He sneezed into his hand and wiped it nonchalantly on the seat beside him. "If that fucker gave me rabies…"

"Are either of you gonna explain just what the fuck happened in there?" Steve asked. "One second I'm sitting here and everything's rosy, next thing I know people are running, and _shit_ man, just where the fuck is Chris?"

"Dead," Mike said coolly, as he inspected his bandage. "He went crazy. I always knew he was a fucking screwball. He bit me like some crazy ass dog or something; I had to shoot him."

"Oh my God."

Mike thumped the armrest in anger at this shitty situation they found themselves in. "We coulda been set for life, guys." He said despairingly.

Had Mike Bowman known just how shitty his situation really was, he likely would have put a bullet in his head right there and then. Unfortunately for those involved in the events that would unfurl over the next few minutes, that didn't happen.

At the wheel, Steve swerved to avoid a stalled car, and then coasted the Ferrari back into the correct lane to dodge a passing ambulance. He revved the speedometer needle up slightly, feeling himself being pushed back into his seat and fixing his eyes on the intersection ahead. The traffic light on the corner pulsed yellow, then red. Steve kept her going; by all indications, the intersection was clear, and there were no cop cars to be seen. Getting away from the scene of the failed crime was the most important thing right now. Once Steve had done his job, it would be up to Mike to get them out of this fix they were in. Steve was just going to tell him straight; _Mike,_ he would say,_ if you don't find a way to -_

"_Steve, watch out!"_

Caught up in his thoughts, Steve had left his hands and eyes on autopilot. So he never saw the other car as it swept out from behind the fast food joint on the left. In spite of a hastily slammed brake pedal, the blue Ferrari sideswiped the little grey Pontiac and sent it careening across the street, moving in an almost graceful semicircle as it mounted the sidewalk and rolled onto its side, the passenger side door and everything in front of it resembling a crumpled beer can. The Ferrari itself smashed through two newspaper vending boxes before crashing into one of the steel girders that supported the passing 'L' train line up above. The three men inside were flung forward in their seats, having neglected to fasten their belts. In the brief seconds of disorientation that occur during such an incident, they felt almost weightless, like astronauts hovering around the International Space Station. Then Steve's nose made contact with the steering wheel, producing a sickening crunch. Blood the consistency of watery ketchup pattered across the windshield. The Pontiac meanwhile, came to rest on its roof, wheels still spinning futilely in the air. After a moment, the engines on both cars died, and the only sound was the constant drumming of the rain and the tick of the Pontiac's cooling engine.

At the same time, NORAD and each of the major US Combatant Commands went to DEFCON 4.

Mike Bowman extricated his face from the headrest in front of him and leaned back, rubbing his aching forehead.

_Wha' happened?_

With a string of slurred curses, Wade managed to twist around in his seat and thump Steve on the shoulder. The driver groaned, blood flowing freely from his nose as he pulled his head away from the wheel.

"Nice work dumbass," Wade growled, baring his teeth like a dog. "Real good driving, really fucking-"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Steve moaned, cupping his bleeding nose. "I didn't see him, how was I supposed to-"

"Oh just fucking shut up, both of you!" Mike snarled from the back seat. "We'll just have to hoof it. Let's find somewhere to ditch these guns before the cops show up."

Mike pushed the door open and stepped out, his head swirling. He staggered around the back of the car, leaning on the trunk to keep his balance as the world threatened to fall away and leave him plunging into the abyss of unconsciousness. A slow, steady thumping was emerging from the Pontiac, making a sound like an angry creature trying to escape from a tin can.

"S-should we help them?" Steve asked, holding a tissue to his nose.

Mike shot him a dark look. "I said shut the fuck up, Steve. C'mon, it's this way."

As the three men trotted past the upended Pontiac, the passenger door fell off with an almighty _clang_. A man crawled from the wreck, bleeding from a cut on his temple, with an assault rifle dangling from a strap over his shoulder. As he straightened up and regarded them with confusion, Mike's eyes fell to the man's blue uniform and the badge on his chest.

_Cops,_ he thought dazedly.

"Hey, are you guys…whoa, _whoa_!" The cop half fell, half threw himself to the ground as Mike's AK-47 began spitting bullets at him. The rounds strafed across the storefront behind the upturned Pontiac, sending chips of concrete flying, and shattering a large display window in a cascade of glass chips. Steve and Wade dived for cover, fumbling with their own weapons as Mike backed away, reloading his Kalashnikov with one of the extra magazines in his belt.

Meanwhile, the cop had rolled behind a red fire hydrant and was slamming his assault rifle into the socket of his shoulder and taking aim. The first burst riddled the parked car off to Mike's left, and the second one blew by close enough to make the hem of his jacket twitch and flutter in the wind. Mike slammed the next magazine home and was firing away before he had even aimed properly. He was aware of other people crawling from the crashed Pontiac, running for cover like civilians trying to escape a warzone. A doctor and an old man who shoved him to the ground when a burst of gunfire rang out; a young black couple; a woman in a nurse's uniform...it was the most bizarre police crew Mike had ever seen in his life.

A second cop popped up from behind the car, a shotgun in both hands. He began firing and pumping the action as fast as he could, letting the shotgun bark away. Mike dived behind the parked car and hoisted the AK-47 up over the hood, firing blindly across the street. Beside him, Steve popped another clip into the Uzi had he kept stored in the Ferrari's glove box, and stood up, trying to get a clear shot at the cops behind the Pontiac. He made the mistake of not waiting until the cops were reloading, and it cost him his life. The pig with the assault rifle saw his head the moment it appeared, and opened fire without hesitation. Mike was reloading his AK again when his getaway driver crashed to the ground in front of him, one of his eyes blown out through the back of his head.

_Steve, you useless fucking idiot._

"What do we do?" Wade shouted, leaning down beside him as bullets whizzed over their heads.

Mike shook his head. He had planned to rob a bank and get the fuck out of there without firing a single shot, not get embroiled in a shootout with two heavily armed motherfuckers.

"Let's charge 'em!" He shouted wildly. "We can take these fuckers!"

Wade nodded fiercely. "I'm right behind you, boss!"

The gunfire had fallen silent. Mike risked a glance over the trunk of the car to where the grey Pontiac lay on the other side of the street. The two cops had disappeared; no doubt taking cover behind the overturned vehicle. It was now or never.

Mike vaulted over the car's trunk, blasting away with his Kalashnikov, whilst Wade ran around the hood, pumping and firing his shotgun as quickly as possible. The Pontiac was no longer a car, but rather a block of Swiss cheese that somebody had painted grey. The tires hung in sad, ragged flaps.

Wade made it around one side of the vehicle, and then the assault rifle the first cop had been carrying came sailing through the air and struck him square in the mouth. He staggered back, and the cop shot up like jack from his box, now firing a police-issue pistol in Wade's direction. The first shot went over his shoulder, and the second one dug a furrow through the side of Wade's left forearm. He went down on one knee, clutching his arm as though he had received a particularly painful sting from an angry hornet. He grabbed for his shotgun again, trying to get it into a firing position, and that was when the second cop popped up and gave him the barrel from his own shotgun.

Mike had thrown himself behind the Pontiac, and was reloading yet again. This was it; he was on his own. He was about to fling himself around the car and start blasting away, when something inside caught his eye. There was an unconscious, or more likely dead man still strapped in, now hanging upside down from his seat belt. Even through the starred glass, Mike recognized the sallow face and black, oily hair.

"Ben…?"

Suddenly, the cop was staring at him through the other window. Mike jerked back as the bullets came bursting through, ricocheting off the street and the car's steel frame. He jumped to his feet, coming face to face with the shotgun-wielding cop.

"Drop your weapon!"

"Fuck you!"

The gunfire exploded again, rippling up and down the street. To anyone in the distance, it would have sounded as though some frantic July 4 celebration was taking place. The cop went down first, clutching his side as the bullet tore through the flesh there. Mike moved around the car, intending to stamp the man out once and for all, like the annoying little bug he was.

"Freeze," A calm voice called from behind him. "Don't move."

At some point, the other cop had outflanked him. Mike bared his teeth, his face convulsing into an angry snarl. He twisted around with a speed that surprised even himself, the barrel of his Kalashnikov spinning through the air as it turned to face its target. No matter how fast he was however, the cop was ready. The first bullet took Mike in the lower stomach; the second one hit only a matter of inches away from the first. He staggered back, twisting and flailing madly, before hitting the concrete with a bone-jarring thud. The Kalashnikov soared through the air and clattered to the ground just out of arm's reach.

Mike had barely made contact with the ground before his hand was going for the holster on his thigh.

The cop saw what he intended to do, and pulled the trigger of his own pistol immediately, producing nothing but a dry click.

_Empty._ In that sliver of a second, Mike Bowman saw his chance, and took it.

The cop popped the empty magazine from his handgun and grabbed another one out of his belt. At the same time, Mike was drawing his Desert Eagle from its holster, fully loaded with .50 caliber bullets. In a second, Mr. Cop would resemble something from a Jackson Pollock painting.

The cop slammed his magazine home just as Mike raised the Desert Eagle and fired.

Nothing happened.

_The safety's on._ He thought numbly.

_THE FUCKING SAFETY IS STILL -_

The rest of his thoughts were drowned out by the thudding explosions from the barrel of the cop's gun. Mike Bowman died with a snarl frozen on his face, the Desert Eagle falling from his stiffening hand as his mind slipped off the mortal coil, and the rain washed the streets clean of his tainted blood.

* * *

Tom lowered the Glock, breathing hard. The rain had plastered his hair over his eyes, and he swiped it out of the way impatiently, trotting back around the Pontiac - _try driving that thing now, ha_ - to where Joe leaned against the brick storefront, clutching his side. There was blood leaking between his fingers, but not a lot of it.

"J-Joe?" He asked shakily.

"I'm okay," Joe gritted his teeth as he got to his feet. "He just winged me. Hurts like a bitch, though."

"Walk it off." Tom said, smiling in spite of himself. His whole body was flushed with adrenaline. He felt like he could have done the Tour de France and barely broken a sweat. "Who the hell were-?"

The rest of his sentence was drowned out by a loud cry for help. It was the old man, George. He was crouching over the prone body of a woman in purple scrubs on the sidewalk just down the street. Tom felt the adrenaline in his body flush away as though somebody had pulled a plug somewhere inside of him. It was replaced by abject horror.

Joe's face had gone paper white. Forget the zombies, with their pale, hungry eyes and grasping hands; forget the soldiers, stormtroopers with whatever ounces of humanity or compassion they might possess hidden away behind latex gas masks. The look of abject terror on his friend's face was one of the most terrible things Tom Everett had ever seen. Joe bolted down the street before Tom could even open his mouth, calling his fiancee's name over and over and over.

_Jesus Christ,_ Tom thought as he sprinted after him. Overhead the first hammerfall of thunder boomed across the sky. _When's this going to end?_

* * *

_A.N. Thanks to everybody who's read, reviewed, subscribed, etc; And thanks to Rhoades for taking the time to read through this for me._


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